Often when trying to catch up on the news or just researching something online, I come across article pages filled with distractions. Ads before the article, ads around the article, ads below the article, ads in the article, obscene sidebars with three or four columns, animated neon dancing bears trying to sell me railroad testing equipment at a Ruby on Rails site, you get the idea. Sure, you could use something like FlashBlock and get the worst of these out of the way. But often you’re still left with a misshapen mass of text whose designer might have had a number of priorities before getting to clarity of presentation.
Enter Readability:
Readability is a simple tool that makes reading on the Web more enjoyable by removing the clutter around what you’re reading.
Huzzah! Simply go to the Readability site and try out the different options for how you want rendered pages to look. You can change things like font size and style, as well as margin. You can even make the colors inverted if you prefer a dark background. Then drag the indicated button to your bookmark toolbar and click it whenever you are on a page you want to be more readable. After discovering Readability, I’ve been using it every day.
I was interested to see that the new version of Safari released today (version 5) added a feature called Safari Reader. This serves the same purpose as Readability, just built into the browser’s address bar. It doesn’t appear that Safari Reader allows you to set more advanced options like the appearance of the font, but it does have the added benefit of remembering your zoom level.
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You assume that the reader is the customer. The reader is not the customer. The reader is the product sold to the customer. The customer is the advertiser.
And the advertiser *wants* you to be distracted. At all cost.
Now shut up and enjoy your free content.