4 ms·

QuickRead: A bookmarklet that adds Readability to every link

32 points by jamesjyu 16y ago

mdolon 16y ago
As a user this is an awesome tool, but as a content producer that relies on advertising revenue this is potentially a nightmare. While you can argue that it's similar to AdBlock, you're essentially 'forcing' the removal of ads on your users, whereas a browser plugin is optional and takes at least some work to install (finding it, installing and restarting browser). Just seems scary to imagine lots of websites picking this up, as that could kill advertising revenue for many sites.
- _delirium 16y ago
  Yeah, I have mixed feelings about it also, since it allows the linker, not just the browser user, to rewrite what the linked content looks like. Though, some of my mixed feelings come from the other direction: if stuff like this becomes widespread, sites that do have nice layouts, not a ton of in-your-face advertising, etc., lose their competitive advantage. Right now I avoid linking to particularly egregious sites, but if I could link to a decent article via a mechanism that reformatted it to be readable, maybe it's ok? And that'd remove the advantage that more friendly sites currently have in attracting links. Perhaps it's a bit idiosyncratic, but for my personal surfing, I do some minimal ad-blocking via a local proxy (polipo), but I have it configured to return the default 503 Forbidden response, so sites that have been ad-blocked are marked up with a bunch of ugly error frames, rather than silently rewritten into nicer-looking sites. It keeps sites from loading their terrible video ads, say, while not allowing me to forget that they do have them (which in turn reminds me to be careful when sending such links to people who might not have an ad-blocker installed).
  - Groxx 16y ago
    If your layout doesn't help drive traffic, something like this won't change things. If it does, then people will probably go to your site because they prefer it. For instance, all these reader-tools like this are utterly worthless for navigating a site, so if the person is at all interested in more they must visit the site. And then you're back to your layout helping things or not. Advertising revenue: certainly a concern. But no more so than any other adblocker out there. Layout? Not particularly, unless you rely entirely on layout and not on content. In which case, I generally say good riddance.
ronnier 16y ago
plug I'm doing something very similar, with the exception that I do all the processing on the server side. For example, you can link to the text of this article like this: http://viewtext.org/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.readshout.com%2Fquickread http://viewtext.org/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.readshout.com%2Fqu... I'm making this so other sites can provide links to ViewText on their pages, similar to how I'm using it on http://ihackernews.com http://ihackernews.com. It's great for mobile phones. It also handles RSS feeds -- putting the full text of the article in the RSS feed. In addition, it rewrites links back through the reader, caches pages in the event that they go down, and a couple of other things... BTW, nice work jamesjyu.
- tectonic 16y ago
  What did you implement your Readability algorithm in?
  - ronnier 16y ago
    C#, yes... probably not so popular around here :)
- ritonlajoie 16y ago
  I use viewtext and ihackernews everyday on my iphone. That's great to browse HN and the web. Thanks ronnier for your great work !
  - ronnier 16y ago
    Thanks, I'm glad it is worthy of being used :D
tumland 16y ago
Didn't work for me. The text of the article spilled off over the bottom of the white overlay panel, and then catastrophically collided with text underneath.
auxbuss 16y ago
This isn't actually using the Reability plug-in, though, when it's installed. So, it doesn't pick up users' Readability settings, which are very important in many cases. Thus, one has to apply Readability to the Fancyboxed page in any case. Seems to me that this has the ability to break too many things, where there is an option to DIY, should you wish -- just install the Readability plug-in, which is, frankly, awesome, and invaluable for the visually impaired.
johnwatson11218 16y ago
I have thought that an algorithm like this could be useful in conjunction with something like zap reader for being able to browse around in "zap reader" mode. I like reading my longer blogs on zap reader by it is sort of a pain to copy and paste the text into the little zap reader box. Some way to automatically identify and process the main block of text on a page would really help matters.
tectonic 16y ago
If these were written in Ruby, please consider contributing back any patches to http://github.com/iterationlabs/ruby-readability http://github.com/iterationlabs/ruby-readability
- jamesjyu 16y ago
  It's all javascript.

32 points by jamesjyu 16y ago

As a user this is an awesome tool, but as a content producer that relies on advertising revenue this is potentially a nightmare. While you can argue that it's similar to AdBlock, you're essentially 'forcing' the removal of ads on your users, whereas a browser plugin is optional and takes at least some work to install (finding it, installing and restarting browser). Just seems scary to imagine lots of websites picking this up, as that could kill advertising revenue for many sites.

_delirium 16y ago
Yeah, I have mixed feelings about it also, since it allows the linker, not just the browser user, to rewrite what the linked content looks like. Though, some of my mixed feelings come from the other direction: if stuff like this becomes widespread, sites that do have nice layouts, not a ton of in-your-face advertising, etc., lose their competitive advantage. Right now I avoid linking to particularly egregious sites, but if I could link to a decent article via a mechanism that reformatted it to be readable, maybe it's ok? And that'd remove the advantage that more friendly sites currently have in attracting links. Perhaps it's a bit idiosyncratic, but for my personal surfing, I do some minimal ad-blocking via a local proxy (polipo), but I have it configured to return the default 503 Forbidden response, so sites that have been ad-blocked are marked up with a bunch of ugly error frames, rather than silently rewritten into nicer-looking sites. It keeps sites from loading their terrible video ads, say, while not allowing me to forget that they do have them (which in turn reminds me to be careful when sending such links to people who might not have an ad-blocker installed).
- Groxx 16y ago
  If your layout doesn't help drive traffic, something like this won't change things. If it does, then people will probably go to your site because they prefer it. For instance, all these reader-tools like this are utterly worthless for navigating a site, so if the person is at all interested in more they must visit the site. And then you're back to your layout helping things or not. Advertising revenue: certainly a concern. But no more so than any other adblocker out there. Layout? Not particularly, unless you rely entirely on layout and not on content. In which case, I generally say good riddance.

ronnier 16y ago

plug I'm doing something very similar, with the exception that I do all the processing on the server side. For example, you can link to the text of this article like this: http://viewtext.org/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.readshout.com%2Fquickread http://viewtext.org/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.readshout.com%2Fqu... I'm making this so other sites can provide links to ViewText on their pages, similar to how I'm using it on http://ihackernews.com http://ihackernews.com. It's great for mobile phones. It also handles RSS feeds -- putting the full text of the article in the RSS feed. In addition, it rewrites links back through the reader, caches pages in the event that they go down, and a couple of other things... BTW, nice work jamesjyu.

tectonic 16y ago
What did you implement your Readability algorithm in?
- ronnier 16y ago
  C#, yes... probably not so popular around here :)
ritonlajoie 16y ago
I use viewtext and ihackernews everyday on my iphone. That's great to browse HN and the web. Thanks ronnier for your great work !
- ronnier 16y ago
  Thanks, I'm glad it is worthy of being used :D

tumland 16y ago

Didn't work for me. The text of the article spilled off over the bottom of the white overlay panel, and then catastrophically collided with text underneath.

auxbuss 16y ago

This isn't actually using the Reability plug-in, though, when it's installed. So, it doesn't pick up users' Readability settings, which are very important in many cases. Thus, one has to apply Readability to the Fancyboxed page in any case. Seems to me that this has the ability to break too many things, where there is an option to DIY, should you wish -- just install the Readability plug-in, which is, frankly, awesome, and invaluable for the visually impaired.

johnwatson11218 16y ago

I have thought that an algorithm like this could be useful in conjunction with something like zap reader for being able to browse around in "zap reader" mode. I like reading my longer blogs on zap reader by it is sort of a pain to copy and paste the text into the little zap reader box. Some way to automatically identify and process the main block of text on a page would really help matters.

tectonic 16y ago

If these were written in Ruby, please consider contributing back any patches to http://github.com/iterationlabs/ruby-readability http://github.com/iterationlabs/ruby-readability

jamesjyu 16y ago
It's all javascript.