

Show HN: Paste a link to an article, get a minimal version to read - mpgarate
http://justread.mpgarate.com/

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bpierre
Example with “The Rise And Fall Of The Dreamcast” (multiple pages):
[http://justread.mpgarate.com/read?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.gamas...](http://justread.mpgarate.com/read?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.gamasutra.com%2Fview%2Ffeature%2F132517%2Fthe_rise_and_fall_of_the_dreamcast.php)

Original:
[http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/132517/the_rise_and_fa...](http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/132517/the_rise_and_fall_of_the_dreamcast.php)

Awesome tool!

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cliveowen
[http://evernote.com/clearly/](http://evernote.com/clearly/) I've been using
this for years, now I can't read an article without it.

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topherjaynes
To show of the functionality for first time page landers you should pre-
populate with a popular article url. I had to open a new tab and find an
article to test. I almost didn't come back. Almost, but glad I did!

~~~
grimtrigger
I see website after website make this mistake. How is this not painfully
obvious?

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huskyr
What's the difference between this and something like Instapaper or the
iReader plugin ([1])?

[1]:
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ireader/ppelffpjgk...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ireader/ppelffpjgkifjfgnbaaldcehkpajlmbc)

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mpgarate
Useful for articles that have sluggish javascript behavior, span multiple
pages, or are otherwise hard to read.

Example use with a TechCrunch article:
[http://justread.mpgarate.com/read?url=http%3A%2F%2Ftechcrunc...](http://justread.mpgarate.com/read?url=http%3A%2F%2Ftechcrunch.com%2F2014%2F07%2F26%2Fthe-
first-trillion-dollar-startup%2F)

Also works well as a bookmarklet:

javascript:window.location.replace("[http://justread.mpgarate.com/read?url="](http://justread.mpgarate.com/read?url=")
\+ escape(document.URL))

~~~
jscheel
Ugh, I need to set up an extension to automatically rewrite all Techcrunch
urls.

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glittershark
Pentadactyl command to do this with the currently open page:

    
    
        :command! justread execute 'open justread.mpgarate.com/read?url=' + buffer.URL

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hyp0
[http://justread.mpgarate.com/read?url=news.ycombinator.com%2...](http://justread.mpgarate.com/read?url=news.ycombinator.com%2Fnews)

see also readability.

but what I really want is a _low bandwidth_ version of a webpage, to conserve
my mobile data plan.

~~~
analog31
Could the browser tackle this? If I understand it correctly, in broad strokes,
nothing comes down unless the browser asks the server for it.

I'm dating myself, but when I first learned about HTML, the idea was that text
would be organized so the browser could make it more readable for you, based
on your needs. For instance, a deaf person could use a text-to-speech browser,
and perhaps the heading tags would help them navigate the document.

Today's web page simply treat the screen as a graphical canvas.

In those old days, I also learned that having a crummy obsolete browser for my
crummy obsolete computer actually sped up browsing because my browser was
simply incapable of downloading the stuff that ate bandwidth.

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cdbattags
package it with [http://squirt.io/](http://squirt.io/) and suddenly we can
read everything

~~~
vidyesh
Not sure if this practically possible to read a whole article this way or not
but this is an awesome tool.

How come I never stumbled upon this!?

Thank you very much.

~~~
jonalmeida
It's been on HN a while back, but while using it in practical cases like WSJ,
it seemed to pick up HTML code, whitespace characters and/or text from a
sidebar.

I ditched it at the time, but I may try to start using it again if I can get
it work with ebooks.

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masukomi
what is different about this than the original arc90 readability algorithm
with an URL field added to kick off the processing?

~~~
mpgarate
This project directly uses the Readability api.

I created this as a more simple interface than Readability offers, primarily
for my own personal use as a bookmarklet.

~~~
StavrosK
I didn't know they had an API. Would it be easy to create a bookmarklet that
used it? I don't like their extension, it feels too heavy. I want something
that doesn't run until I invoke it.

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akavel
By the way, does anybody here know of an algorithm (and/or already implemented
open-source library/app) that copes well with auto-extracting content from
_forum-like_ websites? (i.e. phpBB, StackOverflow, HN, reddit, ...)

~~~
krapp
Umm... anything that uses xpaths should work I would think.

Apologies for blowing my own horn but I've had some luck filtering HN and
reddit with this project I built (I used to have an example in progress online
but i've taken it down):
[https://github.com/kennethrapp/embedbug](https://github.com/kennethrapp/embedbug)

~~~
akavel
The point is I want some heuristic that would work "automagically" (like
Readability, etc), _not_ requiring me to invent a tailor-made xpath for each
and every such website in the world.

~~~
rahimnathwani
Try this:

[http://fivefilters.org/content-only/](http://fivefilters.org/content-only/)

It has a default extractor, and site-specific recipes use the same format as
Instapaper, so you can leverage the work Marco has done on different sites.

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suprjami
Don't spose you're putting the source up anywhere?

Knowing my luck I'd get used to reading with this, then you'd disappear off
the internet forever. It'd be nice to be able to self-host.

~~~
mpgarate
That is a nice idea. I'll have to prepare the code a bit for this but will
likely do so. In that case, I will let you know.

justread is written with golang!

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infinitone
At first I thought by minimal, you meant summarized/shortened. Perhaps use an
additional words to describe what you mean.

Other than that- looks good.

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praveenster
Care to share the details of the html parser? is it one of
arc90/goose/boilerpipe/fivefilters or a new engine?

~~~
cag_ii
> Built by mpgarate with the Readability API.

Is noted in the footer.

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badloginagain
Would like to see as a browser extension, one button click to view the page in
a readable format. Great work.

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wehadfun
this is great would like it even more if it remove all images and displayed
text in a boring font.

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nazgul
You're not concerned about the copyright issues related to this?

