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Readability Bookmarklet & reading aids for your web browser
April 21, 2009 | 2:57 am
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By Robert Nagle
I usually hate cluttering up my browser with all sorts of customizations, but here are 3 things I recommend.
- Readability bookmarklet. Drag the icon to your browser, and now with a click of a button you can standardize the way text appears in the browser. You set your preferred text width and height, a cookie saves your preferences. So whenever you find a webpage with lots of fancy (and extraneous) layout stuff or annoying ads, clicking the bookmark will render the page clean in your browser. (recommended by Dorothea Salo and Baldur Bjarnason). This bookmark works best when you clicking on a page with a single article. Therefore, if you click it for a random CNN article, you’ll be fine, On the other hand, if you click it when your browser is on the TeleRead home page, it will only render one post. Here’s more thoughts on the developer’s blog.
- Wayback machine bookmark (It’s midway down, listed under Take the Wayback Machine with You). Isn’t it annoying when you get a 404 error and you have to go to Wayback Machine to retrieve it. Let’s see, what was that URL again? (Hint: it’s not www.wayback.org). Dragging this little thing to your browser bar makes wayback only one click away. (Speaking of which, given that Wayback is so vital to the Internet, why don’t browsers have a built in way to access the wayback version of the URL?
- StumbleUpon Toolbar. Whenever I want to kill time, I will set the stumbleupon toolbar to my favorite category (Humor, Poetry, Ambient Music, American Lit), and just keep hitting the Stumble button and see what happens. You can hit some wild stuff in any category. Let’s face it; in the world of online writing, so much is overlooked; there are times when serendipity brings results that are equal to or better than what shows up on your favorite blog. It includes lots of social media/bookmarking features, and I imagine that stumbleupon (like Digg) can be gamed by savvy marketers. For now, though, it still is fun and silly.
Feel free to recommend other aids.
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Comments:
No Squint is a Firefox add on that allows you to set a global zoom level for a page and also a text-only zoom level for a page. For example, for TeleRead I don’t zoom the page, but I set a text zoom of 120% to make it easier to read. Usually I use the text zoom rather than the global zoom.
One nice thing about the program is that you can set it to remember the individual zoom levels for any particular url – so whenever I open TeleRead it automatifcally sets the zoom level for the page and I don’t have to do anything.
You can find it here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2592
Robert, a perfect example of why I love Teleread! Readability is toooo neat. Not sure about Wayback Machine…seems another time gobbler, which I why I uninstalled StumbleUpon some months back.
Thx so much.
It’s also worth noting that there’s an “equivalent” to Readability in InstaPaper, which has a similar bookmarklet that lets you sync a readable-ized version to an app on your iPhone or iPod Touch (or to the InstaPaper website, where a more readable version can be read from there).