Now this is too good not to share. Like most people I spend an increasing amount of time reading things online. It can be a real pain being assailed by ads, dodgy typography and all manner of drivel when all you want is to read the words and maybe see a picture too.
Wouldn’t it be nice if someone could turn a web page into something out of a book, or a newspaper or an ebook? Something that always looks the same – how you want it?
Enter the very clever thing called Readability.
First, go to their website where you’ll see the page below.
Fiddle with the settings until you get a style that suits you. Note that you can also convert hyperlinks to footnotes too, which I like a lot. When you’re happy with the preview drag the bookmarklet to your browser bar.
Then when you see any site with a longish article you’d like to read properly just click on the Readability bookmarklet. In a flash it turns this Telegraph page…
Into this, with a neat little footnote at the bottom for urls (long article so you can’t see it here but you can see the little 1 for the link to it).
Count me in as a fan. There is something similar in the new Safari apparently. But you don’t have to have Apple running your browser with Readability — the choice remains yours.
Related posts:
I just came across an interesting, free browser=based app called toread – when you see a webpage that looks worth reading, but don’t have the time, you click on the toread button on your menu bar. toread then sends a .pdf snapshot of the page to your email address. It’s simple, but, I’m finding, very useful.
toread.cc is the company’s website.
Oh, wait – it’s not a .pdf, it’s some other format. I’ve just discovered that if an article runs, say, three pages, you have to choose the single page view prior to hitting the toread button. If you don’t do that, you’ll end up being redirected to the original source site while reading.
Not that that’s a big deal.