We’re trying to make sure our already-bloated ego’s are kept in check as the praise for Readability continues to roll in. Many of us here at Arc90 use it all the time and we’re glad it’s made reading on the Web more enjoyable.
Today, we’re happy to announce an important update to Readability. At the top left corner, you’ll find three buttons that make the Readability experience even better. You can now reload a page, print a page and send a page’s link to others in just a couple of clicks.
One note about privacy and security. We will not be keeping logs of your sent emails and corresponding notes and we will never share your emails with anyone. You can view the source code behind this release (tagged 0.4.1) in Google Code. Readability is an open source project.
To install this update, all you have to do is.nothing! Just keep using Readability the way you always have. We hope you find this update as useful as we do.
Joe said:
Nice upgrade! On my machine, the old readability button quit working – so I had to delete it and reinstall from the readability web page – and now it’s working again.
I use readability in conjunction with F11 (full screen mode) to eliminate ALL distraction from my screen while reading. Works even better on a 9 or 10 inch netbook with eeeRotate installed. The following post describes how to do this (along with some background information on problems with reading on the web):
http://www.filterjoe.com/2009/03/25/filters-for-reading-on-the-web/
Matt said:
It’d be great if you guys could incorporate something like Gina Trapani’s Darken bookmarklet. I use Readability and a slightly-altered Darken (all links simply white) for most things I read online and it’d be nice to save the extra click.
Ben Hyde said:
I don’t like ‘em! Not one bit. Tis ironic, adding distractions after stripping them.
Put ‘em in the footer?
Since I’m complaining … I was disappointed that the link shared is not also readable.
Otherwise, I love readablity and use it a half dozen times a day at this point.
Melgior said:
I use Readability a lot and I really like it. On rare occasions, it selects the wrong text block – for example on forums. It would be cool if Readability could skip the auto-magic text box selection if there is content selected on the page, so I can override the selection whenever necessary.
Keep up the good work!
Ben said:
I don’t know if I will use the added buttons, but I wanted to chime in to say I am really enjoying using Readability overall!
M said:
While it’s great to have these functions handy, I find the buttons’ appearance distracting. I’d prefer them a bit less conspicuous (remove the grey background?) so that I won’t notice them unless I’m actually looking straight at them.
Many thanks for making online reading infinitely more pleasurable!
Richard Ziade said:
Hi M:
Thanks for the feedback. We’ve heard a few people find them distracting. We’re considering moving them to the bottom of the body of text. We’ll also play around with your suggestion as well.
Thanks,
Rich
zvika said:
Hi,
I would really appreciate if there was a way for readability to view right-to-left content (direction:rtl;).
Anyway, readability is great and I use it a lot.
Fred Flange said:
I find Readability so useful.
But there is something you could add to my wish list:
Is there any way it could be automated to that whenever I read a page from an RSS feed from a given live Bookmark in Firefox, it is always displayed via Readability.
Perhaps a context menu item which says ‘Open in a Readability Tab’, or perhaps an Add On which could be used to ‘Flag’ the Bookmark.
This would save me having to display the page ‘normally’, then re-displaying it via the Readability Button.
Keep up the great work.
Best
Fred F.
M said:
Wow, that was quick. The buttons are now perfect: barely noticeable when I don’t need them, easily accessible when I do. Thank you!
Anthony Mastrean said:
I’ve been using the Readability bookmarklet and Lifehacker’s Darken bookmarklet (http://tr.im/jkVT) without trouble until today! Darken now hides the new Readability buttons on the top left of the page.
Julien Couvreur said:
Nice work. Thanks for Readability.
Have you guys seen Bill Hill’s experiments (http://www.billhillsite.com/) with more paperlike interfaces? The premise is that web page scrolling is not very readable. On the other hand, multi-column and paginated layout is very well suited for the serial pattern recognition involved in reading.
Richard Ziade said:
Julien – we’ve actually played around with a paging-style interface for Readability. It’s an interesting way to read and I think it’s something I would prefer personally. Who knows…it may make it in one day.
-Rich
Gal Winer said:
any chance to add Right-to-Left languages support?
great tool btw
thanks
GavinRB said:
Amazing. This is a dream come true. Especially for an old guy with vision issues who is easily distracted…. oh look, a shiny object…. Seriously, thanks.
Robin said:
At this point I’m practically incapable of reading a blog without Readability. It’s fantastic.
I would like to be able to send links to people formatted with Readability. In the early days of TidyRead (we’re talking a few months back) the clean page was accessed through a TidyRead link. They don’t do that any more and I’m now looking for such a solution.
If you have anything like that in the pipeline or if anyone has seen the like elsewhere, please let me know. Thanks.
Robin said:
You can ignore me, I figured it out.
javascript:void(location.href=’http://www.tidyread.com/tidyread.php?u=’+location.href)
But quite honestly I prefer Readability’s formatting. So if you have a Readability solution for me…
Benjamin Tredrea said:
I thank you for Readability, it is truly amazing, well done.
Glad there are some clever people in this world that think of us old fellas who want to read an article without all the add-ons.
Regards, Benjamin.
Bill Jacobs said:
Wonderful!! What a great app! Thanks -
Bill
Mark said:
I just learned about Readability and it looks very promising.
As a committed Tablet PC user, one of my chief frustrations has been web sites hard-coded with wide text, forcing me to scroll horizontally with every line. Readability looks like it nicely addresses this problem and will become a staple of my web reading diet. Thanks!
Julien Couvreur said:
Rich — Glad to hear you’re considering a paginated interface.
Another idea: would it be possible for Readability to include some heuristics to detect “next page”, and giving some interface (keyboard or mouse) to navigate to it?
Here is an example: http://mises.org/austecon/chap2.asp
Readability does a good job on the page, but it removes this important link.
Charles LePage said:
I’d love to be able to add a “Readability” button to each of my posts, so my readers would be able to create a print ready version of my posts right from my web site. Is that possible?
Keyvan said:
I’m really glad I found this. Great work! Does anyone know if it’s been ported to another language, like PHP, so users also have the option of running it on the server?
I’m interested because I think it’d be very handy for RSS feeds which don’t provide full-text content. I’d love to have a service which takes an RSS feeds with only URLs and titles and runs the readability code on each URL to get back the full-text content. The output would be a new RSS feed with full-text content included.
Charles, for printing your blog content, you might be interested in a project I’m working on: RSS to PDF Newspaper (click my name for info).
mysticpixels said:
Readability is a concept just out of the box ! Was really looking for functionality like this for long. But sometimes it is not working as expected, as it selects the wrong content ( i tried using it to read a blog and it was just displaying the first post and the post header was not there, there was the page header instead :P). It would be nice if the team could test it in such scenarios and make it much better and give it a more more pleasant User Experience … Great work team :)
club penguin said:
The old readability button quit working (on my computer) so I had to delete it and reinstall from the readability web page – and now it’s working again. I use readability in conjunction with F11 to eliminate ALL distraction from my screen while reading. Works even better on a 9 or 10 inch netbook with eeeRotate installed.
Carl Zimmer said:
One suggestion to make Readability even better: it doesn’t seem as if the options for viewing have any effect on how a page looks printed out. I’d love to have a printed version with the same medium margins as I like on the screen, for example. But the printed version always looks the same.
Julien Couvreur said:
I use Readability daily and my friends love it too. Thanks folks!
It would be awesome if it could incorporate smarts to handle Next/Previous pages.
Often, after applying the Readability bookmarklet, the next/previous links disappear, since they are not part of the body of the content. It would be great if Readability could be smart and detect such links and display them (maybe in the tools area?).
There is a Greasemonkey script which has some of this functionality, which may be useful for inspiration: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/2199
Larry said:
Love it.
Only works with Safari so far.
Can anyone help me load it to Chrome or Foxfire (just got the latest update)
Thanks
Seth said:
I’m having problems with Readability — it doesn’t select the right texts on many of the sites I try to use it on, choosing reviews/comments sections instead of the main body of text that I want to read. Is there a way to make it select a certain grouping of text?