5 ms·

I find lynx/terminal style browsers easier to read. But one thing I did notice was that they were slower than some of the graphical ones (the last time I tried

by cobweb 11y ago

I find lynx/terminal style browsers easier to read. But one thing I did notice was that they were slower than some of the graphical ones (the last time I tried). So I ended up modding my GUI web browsers for readability. I'd like to see a speed comparison. A browser where you disable JS, CSS and images, you'd hope may be smart enough to not fetch or process unneeded assets. I have a 1.4mb connection at home, and many sites are painful to use, to the point I just don't bother. Because of lavish asset loading - with advertising etc. Most of my web reading is suspended to the future: add to queue -> process page to text -> send to e-reader, partly as it's more comfortable, and also because of sluggishness in sites/pages. On faster connections/faster computers it's less of a pain. Mobile is generally a world of pain (for me at least)!

luxpir 11y ago
Do you use custom scripts for that reading workflow, or something more generally available? Could be a nice partial solution for procrastination.
- cobweb 11y ago
  I didn't really want to flag a specific e-reader. And was hinting at something more general. As you say I'm sure you could bolt something together, like I have been meaning to. At the moment it's as boring as a readability bookmarklet. That then sends the parsed html to a free kindle address. Readability will accept urls to process in emails. But this doesn't work for me. I forget why. Also readability sometimes borks and I never get the page. And sometimes readability can't read something. It just comes out blank. Probably a JS heavy page or something. Managing readability archives and searching through them isn't that great. I'm not really a fan of the readability web browser interface. I haven't tried the apps. But it does the job for free so I mustn't grumble. I'd rather email/bookmark links, to process later, to then read at my leisure. And also text index them. Something to improve searching. Also the ability to rate or summarise what I've read. I get articles that upon reading, I don't like. So chaff does get through. I could do with applying feedback. Flagging bad (as in I don't like) sites, bad authors etc. One problem is that I can't do the feedback there and then from my e-reader when I'm in the moment. But actually it might be a good re-enforcment tactic to come back and evaluate later. It would be nice to then share good reads. An email address for reads is good, as you can always ask others to send you stuff. Or perhaps forward an email containing a link to your reading address. I have cognitive difficulty reading from a browser, but am fine with e-ink. Plus it doesn't require an internet connection. It's comfortable. I do tend to neglect my book reading though, which is a bit of a shame. Oh and I have a mountain of articles to read, currently about 1200. With what comes through with readability, sometimes the author is missing. Probably meta data missing. And not having dates and other meta data available can be annoying. Having a datestamp of when I bookmarked it for reading might be nice.
  - cobweb 11y ago
    Oh, there is Calibre, that I have been meaning to try and use. But it's nice to be able to just turn on the kindle (as I'm in the shower or something), and have it download latest reads before I leave the house. Rather than fussing about connecting the machine to another machine etc.
    - falcolas 11y ago
      If you can leave Calibre running, it will process RSS subscriptions in the background on a schedule.
- black_knight 11y ago
  I use pandoc to turn html into epub. Something like the following script could be used. #!/bin/sh curl -- $@ | pandoc --standalone --smart -T '' -o - -f html -t epub
  - cobweb 11y ago
    What does the $@ stand for? Readability strips sidebars, comments etc from web pages. But I'm sure it's leaning on free libraries. I assume pandoc doesn't do that?
    - black_knight 11y ago
      $@ is the command line argument for the script. That is the URL you pass to the script. Pandoc parses the html, converts the parts it can to its internal document model and converts this into EPUB. It doesn't do any intentional stripping, but some things get thrown out because it is not part of its document model. Pandoc is not a single purpose application, but rather the document format swiss-army knife. [0] [0] http://pandoc.org/ http://pandoc.org/

by cobweb 11y ago

luxpir 11y ago

Do you use custom scripts for that reading workflow, or something more generally available? Could be a nice partial solution for procrastination.

cobweb 11y ago
I didn't really want to flag a specific e-reader. And was hinting at something more general. As you say I'm sure you could bolt something together, like I have been meaning to. At the moment it's as boring as a readability bookmarklet. That then sends the parsed html to a free kindle address. Readability will accept urls to process in emails. But this doesn't work for me. I forget why. Also readability sometimes borks and I never get the page. And sometimes readability can't read something. It just comes out blank. Probably a JS heavy page or something. Managing readability archives and searching through them isn't that great. I'm not really a fan of the readability web browser interface. I haven't tried the apps. But it does the job for free so I mustn't grumble. I'd rather email/bookmark links, to process later, to then read at my leisure. And also text index them. Something to improve searching. Also the ability to rate or summarise what I've read. I get articles that upon reading, I don't like. So chaff does get through. I could do with applying feedback. Flagging bad (as in I don't like) sites, bad authors etc. One problem is that I can't do the feedback there and then from my e-reader when I'm in the moment. But actually it might be a good re-enforcment tactic to come back and evaluate later. It would be nice to then share good reads. An email address for reads is good, as you can always ask others to send you stuff. Or perhaps forward an email containing a link to your reading address. I have cognitive difficulty reading from a browser, but am fine with e-ink. Plus it doesn't require an internet connection. It's comfortable. I do tend to neglect my book reading though, which is a bit of a shame. Oh and I have a mountain of articles to read, currently about 1200. With what comes through with readability, sometimes the author is missing. Probably meta data missing. And not having dates and other meta data available can be annoying. Having a datestamp of when I bookmarked it for reading might be nice.
- cobweb 11y ago
  Oh, there is Calibre, that I have been meaning to try and use. But it's nice to be able to just turn on the kindle (as I'm in the shower or something), and have it download latest reads before I leave the house. Rather than fussing about connecting the machine to another machine etc.
  - falcolas 11y ago
    If you can leave Calibre running, it will process RSS subscriptions in the background on a schedule.
black_knight 11y ago
I use pandoc to turn html into epub. Something like the following script could be used. #!/bin/sh curl -- $@ | pandoc --standalone --smart -T '' -o - -f html -t epub
- cobweb 11y ago
  What does the $@ stand for? Readability strips sidebars, comments etc from web pages. But I'm sure it's leaning on free libraries. I assume pandoc doesn't do that?
  - black_knight 11y ago
    $@ is the command line argument for the script. That is the URL you pass to the script. Pandoc parses the html, converts the parts it can to its internal document model and converts this into EPUB. It doesn't do any intentional stripping, but some things get thrown out because it is not part of its document model. Pandoc is not a single purpose application, but rather the document format swiss-army knife. [0] [0] http://pandoc.org/ http://pandoc.org/