Random Thoughts: Readability

I read a lot of news online. In fact, online is the only place I read news these days. The biggest complaint I have about reading news online comes from the fact that News sites (who are struggling to figure out a profitable business model) put so many links and ads on the page that it can be quite distracting to try and just read an article.

Browser plug-ins like ad-block help, but they only block ads. The distractions on news sites are frequently links to other stories and a layout that puts so many different choices in front of you that the body of the story is frequently a narrow column of text interrupted every other paragraph with inline links or ads.

Until recently, my favorite solution was to click "print this article" which would reformat the text for printing and then I would just read that page without actually printing it. Unfortunately not every site has a "print this article" option and frequently the reformatting for printing is not optimized for reading.

Recently I found a better solution.

http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/

This is the coolest, simplest web tool I have seen in a long time. Works with any browser on virtually any web page. Works especially well on news sites.

Takes the body of the article and displays it to your preferences (style, text size, margins) eliminating EVERYTHING else from the page. No ads, no related links, no pop-ups. Nothing but the article you want to read.

It isn't a plugin that automatically reformats your pages as they load. And you wouldn't use it for general browsing. But when you find something you want to read you just click on the link and it loads a "readable" page. It only works when you want it to.

The tool is actually a bookmark, not an application - it just sits as a link on your bookmarks bar. When you get to a story you want to read without all the cluttering distractions, click the link. There is no sign-up and no set-up (other than selecting the font size and margins you prefer).

Try it out.