Skinning MySpace Pages

My company purchased the ad blocks on the home page of MySpace for a test run a few days ago. As part of this run, we decided to try out some more brand/community building aspects and decided to create three myspace skins to mimic the three colors of the Motorola RAZR that we were selling in the media buy. This would seem to be simple, but MySpace’s layout code and how you hack it are ludicrous.

For those of you who don’t know, MySpace is a popular community portal built on ColdFusion (don’t get me started) that lets a user create a personal space, post photos, link to other users, add blog posts and events, and more. One of the “features” is that it also allows users to skin (hack) their pages to look different. This, in and of itself seems great. The kicker is how it renders.

You can’t use an ID selector, only class selectors. So while you could do some powerful manipulation, no use of the # symbol kills a lot of it. It’s also nested table hell. At least four levels deep in most points, and for no good reason. And this netted $580 million from Rupert Murdoch ? I’ve been in the wrong business.

Basically, you’re left with very little ability to do much easily. However, you can do some amazingly cool stuff, as is evident by this users page . One day I’ll figure it all out, but it looks like they’re adding a new skinning engine to the backend and this will alter the whole way things work.

Anyone have a cool skin to share?