Google Chrome plugin version: <a href="https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/jggheggpdocamneaacmfoipeehedigia" rel="nofollow">https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/jggheggpdocamnea...</a> It's faster than the bookmarklet.
readability plus <a href="http://instapaper.com" rel="nofollow">http://instapaper.com</a> are how I read anything of length online.<p>I.e. when I'm ready, and how I like it.
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.<p>If that sounds useful to you, let me know, I can probably open-source it.
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.<p>Would like to be able to change settings once the page has been loaded though.
Readability, as well as Instapaper's similar Instapaper Text bookmarklet(<a href="http://www.instapaper.com/extras" rel="nofollow">http://www.instapaper.com/extras</a>), have made reading online so much better.<p>The thought of being able to use this on an iPad makes me tingly in all the right places.
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.<p>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.<p>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.
I'm trying to apply these usability lessons (based on my multiple-times-daily use of readability + instapaper) to my apps.<p>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.<p>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).
I recently contributed heavily to a Ruby port of Readability, online here: <a href="http://github.com/iterationlabs/ruby-readability" rel="nofollow">http://github.com/iterationlabs/ruby-readability</a>
There's an alternative to the Readability tool called Clippable: <a href="http://brettterpstra.com/2009/11/03/clippable" rel="nofollow">http://brettterpstra.com/2009/11/03/clippable</a>
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
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).<p>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.
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. <a href="http://cold-sunrise-39.heroku.com/" rel="nofollow">http://cold-sunrise-39.heroku.com/</a><p>There's also a bookmarklet there so you can easily process urls.
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.
A similar little project I undertook recently: <a href="http://purepistos.net/thankful-eyes" rel="nofollow">http://purepistos.net/thankful-eyes</a> Still needs polish, but I use it often instead of browser zooming or Readability. Feedback or patches welcome.
I also love good reading on Internet. I use Readability and Readable. Here is Readable project: <a href="http://readable-app.appspot.com/setup.html?better_web_readability" rel="nofollow">http://readable-app.appspot.com/setup.html?better_web_readab...</a>
There's a Firefox addon as well. <a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/46442" rel="nofollow">https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/46442</a>
Maybe not everyone is aware so I want to point out these issues:<p>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)<p>2. Don't use it if the website carries "sessionid"s over URL<p>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.<p>Developers of Readability should point out these security issues clearly in their website.