12 ms·
Readability
- ivankirigin 17y agoreadability plus http://instapaper.com http://instapaper.com are how I read anything of length online. I.e. when I'm ready, and how I like it.
- grinich 17y agoReadability is awesome. It's actually a new feature in the Hacker News iPhone App I built and makes a huge difference when reading pages. Before —> http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4595/hn-readibility-menu.jpg http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4595/hn-readibility-menu.jpg After —> http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4595/hn-readibility-done.jpg http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4595/hn-readibility-done.jpg The update is scheduled for release on Monday.
- fpeyre 17y agosweeet.... looking forward the release of this one!
- JMiao 17y agoinstapaper is one of the few web apps that's changed my internet behavior in a big, pleasantly unexpected way.
- pbhjpbhj 17y agoHow is it different to bookmarks, sounds like very well marketed minimal bookmarking?
- ivankirigin 17y agoThe iphone app is what makes it really useful.
- Roridge 17y agoMy first impression was "that's pointless"... then I tried it... I can see me using that on lots of pages actually. So simple, but so effective. Would like to be able to change settings once the page has been loaded though.
- wheels 17y agoI use it so often that I have it bound to a Quicksilver hotkey. I must use it at least 5 times a day. Even in the cases where the layout isn't particularly bad the consistency of reading things formatted in a way you're used to makes stuff easier to read.
- Roridge 17y agoUntil today I always used to CTRL+Scroll and highlight text... NO MORE :) I have it on my FF bar now... would love the feature to change the style it while looking at the page.. different pages need different reading styles for me.
- semanticist 17y agoThere's so many websites with tiny text and colours with really poor contrast, especially people's blogs about their business/start-up experience, I've found. Most of them are just about readable on my 24" iMac, but on my tiny little netbook, if it wasn't for Readability I'd miss out on them. Of course, in an ideal world we wouldn't need Readability as much because people would consider small screen sizes and poor eyesight when picking the site design.
- mildweed 17y agoPrevious thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=501970 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=501970
- nfg 17y agoI saved the bookmarklet with the keyword 'read', so when I'm a site that could benefit from it (which happens a lot) it's a simple: Ctrl-l read <return> away
- sp332 17y agoGoogle Chrome plugin version: https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/jggheggpdocamneaacmfoipeehedigia https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/jggheggpdocamnea... It's faster than the bookmarklet.
- hockeybias 17y agoNice!
- pg 17y agoI use this and highly recommend it.
- AndrewHampton 17y agoI've been using this since the last time it was posted on HN and highly recommend it as well.
- gchucky 17y agoThere's a Firefox addon as well. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/46442 https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/46442
- aw3c2 17y agoI just use Opera's built-in accessibility mode.
- callmeed 17y agoReadability + Print to PDF + email to kindle = awesome
- beh 17y agoAll packaged into a "Send to Kindle" Service on Snow Leopard = awesome++
- grumpyfart 17y agoMaybe not everyone is aware so I want to point out these issues: 1. Don't use it if the page is over SSL (it'll include external JS over HTTP which means that you are vulnerable to MITM) 2. Don't use it if the website carries "sessionid"s over URL 3. Keep in mind that arc90's JS can actually read the cookies (I'm not saying they are but they can). That means if someone hack into their systems they can access to cookies in used websites. (think XSS). Obviously by using it you trust instapaper guys with your account in the active website. Developers of Readability should point out these security issues clearly in their website.
- nixme 17y agos/instapaper/arc90/g ?
- grumpyfart 17y agoyou are right, edited.
- telemachos 17y agoYou missed one in #3.
- grumpyfart 17y agoI can't edit it any more, I think because of it's been a while. Anyway I'm sure people will figure out.
- MHordecki 17y agoWith Readability Redux (extension for Chrome) JS is stored locally, so it probably addresses those issues.
- grumpyfart 17y agoSounds nice, I'll look into that.
- Tekhne 17y agoThere's an alternative to the Readability tool called Clippable: http://brettterpstra.com/2009/11/03/clippable http://brettterpstra.com/2009/11/03/clippable
- adriand 17y agoI've actually written a Ruby library modeled on Readability (quite closely modeled - I read the source code of the bookmarklet and based my library on what I learned) that is excellent for screen scraping - like Readability, it is pretty good at finding the element on a site that holds the content, and once you have that, it's trivial to pull the content out. If that sounds useful to you, let me know, I can probably open-source it.
- larrywright 17y agoI'd be interested in that.
- cbryan 17y agoSeconded, I'd love to see this as a library. GitHub it maybe?
- AnneTheAgile 17y agoThirded :).
- goodness 17y agoI did something similar in Java, though it was for a company so I can't open source it. FYI, I noticed that the script changed drastically between (roughly) December and January. The new script works a lot more reliably in my experience. It now has a multi-pass algorithm that relaxes various criteria if it can't find anything with the strictest settings. It also looks for content DOM nodes and assigns points to parent and grandparent DOM nodes. It used to only assign points to the parent, which would give the wrong results in some cases. In any case, I was just thinking that I would really like to get a python library that does the readability thing for a personal Google App Engine project I have in mind. If anyone knows of anything, I'd love to save some time. Otherwise, I'll probably start from Beautiful Soup and try porting readability on top. Your Ruby code might also be useful if you end up open-sourcing it.
- Concours 17y ago
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- greyman 17y agoI use this as well, but I wish someone would do a chrome extension which allows to apply Readability without needed additional click (for example they could display a tiny clickable icon behind every link, which will open the article in Readability mode). Question: Don't you know if Readability can be used programmatically? I would like to have a script, which would automatically save a Readabilite'd version of a web page.
- MHordecki 17y agoIMHO it would be pretty burdensome to have an additional element after every link, but the aesthetics probably depend on how often you're using Readability. As of your question, you can inject <script> tags pointing to Readability into the DOM. If you want to do it without the browser, WebKit is your friend.
- steveklabnik 17y agoYou can bind the bookmarklet to a keyword, as someone suggests above. Then you can just "control-l read enter" and it'll apply it.
- larrywright 17y agoReadability, as well as Instapaper's similar Instapaper Text bookmarklet(http://www.instapaper.com/extras http://www.instapaper.com/extras), have made reading online so much better. The thought of being able to use this on an iPad makes me tingly in all the right places.
- evanrmurphy 17y agoMost browsers let you control font size, and unless the site design is frozen with terrible margins, you can fix that by resizing the window. It still offers some help with the font and color scheme, but I guess I need to play with it more to understand the value.
- brandnewlow 17y agoAh, the war against advertising-based business models rages on.
- joshwa 17y agoI'm trying to apply these usability lessons (based on my multiple-times-daily use of readability + instapaper) to my apps. There's a lot to be said for clear, large, readable, high-contrast text, either where there's a big block of text, or a critical label used for skimming the layout of the page. If you want your users to be able to quickly find the element on a page that's important to them, give it a big fat text label. I sometimes give advice to the web editor at a consumer magazine-- their body text is small, tightly spaced, and low contrast. As a result their average time-on-page and bounce rates are quite depressing. Unfortunately, as is the case in many large orgs, making the content (remember, they are in the content business) more accessible to the site's visitors is not necessarily high on the larger organization's priority list (they seem to only be interested in pageviews, thus boosting their ad inventory so they can qualify for larger ad networks).
- Estragon 17y agoStrange things happen when you apply Readability to a Hacker News thread. Only a fraction of it shows up.
- caffo 17y agoA couple months ago I coded a server side version of the readability bookmarklet. I made it to be able to link to a page and have it converted by the script. http://cold-sunrise-39.heroku.com/ http://cold-sunrise-39.heroku.com/ There's also a bookmarklet there so you can easily process urls.
- tiredandempty 17y agoIs the source code available on the web for the sinatra app?
- Pistos2 17y agoA similar little project I undertook recently: http://purepistos.net/thankful-eyes http://purepistos.net/thankful-eyes Still needs polish, but I use it often instead of browser zooming or Readability. Feedback or patches welcome.
- vladocar 17y agoI also love good reading on Internet. I use Readability and Readable. Here is Readable project: http://readable-app.appspot.com/setup.html?better_web_readability http://readable-app.appspot.com/setup.html?better_web_readab...
- tectonic 17y agoI recently contributed heavily to a Ruby port of Readability, online here: http://github.com/iterationlabs/ruby-readability http://github.com/iterationlabs/ruby-readability
- isleyaardvark 17y agoI'm curious about when you would use a Ruby port of Readability.