
Readability - niyazpk
http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability
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sp332
Google Chrome plugin version:
[https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/jggheggpdocamnea...](https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/jggheggpdocamneaacmfoipeehedigia)
It's faster than the bookmarklet.

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ivankirigin
readability plus <http://instapaper.com> are how I read anything of length
online.

I.e. when I'm ready, and how I like it.

~~~
grinich
Readability 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>

After —> <http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4595/hn-readibility-done.jpg>

The update is scheduled for release on Monday.

~~~
fpeyre
sweeet.... looking forward the release of this one!

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adriand
I'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
I'd be interested in that.

~~~
cbryan
Seconded, I'd love to see this as a library. GitHub it maybe?

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Roridge
My 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
I 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
Until 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.

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mildweed
Previous thread: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=501970>

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pg
I use this and highly recommend it.

~~~
AndrewHampton
I've been using this since the last time it was posted on HN and highly
recommend it as well.

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larrywright
Readability, as well as Instapaper's similar Instapaper Text
bookmarklet(<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.

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semanticist
There'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.

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joshwa
I'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).

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callmeed
Readability + Print to PDF + email to kindle = awesome

~~~
beh
All packaged into a "Send to Kindle" Service on Snow Leopard = awesome++

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tectonic
I recently contributed heavily to a Ruby port of Readability, online here:
<http://github.com/iterationlabs/ruby-readability>

~~~
isleyaardvark
I'm curious about when you would use a Ruby port of Readability.

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Tekhne
There's an alternative to the Readability tool called Clippable:
<http://brettterpstra.com/2009/11/03/clippable>

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nfg
I 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

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greyman
I 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
IMHO 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.

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caffo
A 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/>

There's also a bookmarklet there so you can easily process urls.

~~~
tiredandempty
Is the source code available on the web for the sinatra app?

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Estragon
Strange things happen when you apply Readability to a Hacker News thread. Only
a fraction of it shows up.

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evanrmurphy
Most 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.

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Pistos2
A similar little project I undertook recently:
<http://purepistos.net/thankful-eyes> Still needs polish, but I use it often
instead of browser zooming or Readability. Feedback or patches welcome.

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vladocar
I also love good reading on Internet. I use Readability and Readable. Here is
Readable project: [http://readable-
app.appspot.com/setup.html?better_web_readab...](http://readable-
app.appspot.com/setup.html?better_web_readability)

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gchucky
There's a Firefox addon as well. <https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/46442>

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aw3c2
I just use Opera's built-in accessibility mode.

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brandnewlow
Ah, the war against advertising-based business models rages on.

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grumpyfart
Maybe 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.

~~~
MHordecki
With Readability Redux (extension for Chrome) JS is stored locally, so it
probably addresses those issues.

~~~
grumpyfart
Sounds nice, I'll look into that.

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hockeybias
Nice!

