

QuickRead: A bookmarklet that adds Readability to every link - jamesjyu
http://www.readshout.com/quickread

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ronnier
_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%2Fqu...](http://viewtext.org/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.readshout.com%2Fquickread)

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>. 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.

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ritonlajoie
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
Thanks, I'm glad it is worthy of being used :D

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mdolon
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
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
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.

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tumland
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.

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auxbuss
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.

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johnwatson11218
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.

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

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jamesjyu
It's all javascript.

