Customizing notify-osd
We have had three stable Ubuntu releases featuring notify-osd, and yet, not a single one allowed the user any configuration. I don’t know why, really—it seems to fit the Ayatana team’s “our way or no way” general disposition, but who am I to judge them?
Then I stumbled upon this post. It’s in Russian, and quite old (2009–12!), but it gets the job done. To make notify-osd customizable, you need to add Roman Sukochev’s PPA to your Software Sources, do a system update, and then restart notify-osd (by relogging, or executing pkill notify-osd).

After installing the patched version, you can tweak notify-osd by creating a .notify-osd file in your home directory. A version replicating the Karmic/Lucid defaults can be copy-pasted from here. You can tweak it from there—it should be self-evident.
After I’m finished polishing the Liferea patch, I’ll look for a way to make this patch less hackish. Perhaps move from text settings to gconf, and then write a GUI configuration utility.
As for the only non-obvious setting: “slot-allocation” controls the placement of bubbles. By default, it uses the Jaunty behavior (“dynamic”): all bubbles in the upper-right corner. For the Karmic behavior, where there’s a gap reserved for confirmation bubbles (volume, etc), set it to “fixed”.





How about defaulting to theme colours and integrating with gnome-control-centre appearance app to customise NotifyOSD colours using additional gtk-theme CSS stylesheet with options to modify/override in the appearance app?
If you like this idea please file a bug on launchpad =) i will not cause it’s your idea =)