Book Bites Announcement

Book Bites is currently on hiatus. You can still follow Book Bites on Facebook for snippets, links to giveaways, and book-related images and news. Book Bites may be updated periodically. Feel free to subscribe or follow Zja on social networking sites to see updates.

05 March 2010

Readability: a solution to garish blogs

I came across this post by Justin Woodbridge on Tumblr recently, and I had to share the tip. It is for a web tool called Readability - which changes the skin of the page you are reading to a more generic one. I find this a godsend for all those garish blogs I seem to stumble across. You know the type - the ones with hideous colour schemes that give you migraines and unreadable fonts that give you eye strain? Well all you have to do is use this tool, and it makes it automatically readable... It really is a great tool if you are a blog addict like myself! :D

The website is: http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability
It is also a Firefox add-on: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/46442

The website, with easy to choose options and immediately visible examples:

You then drag the Readability button to your bookmarks, and click it when you want to strip a website of all its crap.


Here is the original post by Justin Woodbridge:
Most websites are poorly designed. The person didn’t know what they were doing, they got it for free off another website, they hired a shoddy designer. You get the gist. The colors clash, ads fill the sidebars, social media badges all over the place, irate commenters at the bottom. Major turn offs from a website. Unfortunately, that doesn’t always mean they aren’t damn good writers. I want to focus on what you have to say, not what the commenters do. So, here’s the solution: A little bookmarklet named Readability. This little tool strips away the garbage, leaving you with a tasteful page. It customizable too


Pop that into your bookmarks bar. Next time you’re browsing the days headlines and you find an article you’d like to absorb, click on it. Bam. A clean and simple page, nothing but prose.

Screenshots
Before*:

After:


*Rather than picking on a blog I follow, I killed an old blog I had for reviews, painting it garish colours... Probably should have added hideous graphics as well LOL

Anyway, this is my solution to finding a blog that you love to read but the design makes you haemorrhage.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I shudder to think of what you will do to my blog. LOL.. :D

Zja Noir said...

Oh, but your blog is one of the easy ones to read! It has such a clean layout :) I think you are safe from my machinations.

Related Posts with Thumbnails