Web graphics and ads filter?

July 1, 2009 6:53 PM

Web filter filter: I seem to remember a link to an NYT article that just contained the full text of the article in nice big letters, with no graphics, banners, or ads. It was fully attributed, with links to the original, but it was much more pleasant to read, especially for a long article. Is there a website that will filter out the clutter and provide links that can be forwarded?
posted by jpg15 to computers & internet (6 comments total)

Maybe it was the print version? When you're looking at most NYT articles online, there's a little box on the center-right that offers a choice of Email, Send to Phone, Print, Reprints, etc. If you click Print, you get a pretty plain vanilla version of the article, which you can link to by copying that URL. hth
posted by mmw at 7:05 PM on July 1

Sounds like the print version, as mmw said. If you want to view a page sans images, you can do that in your browser configurations.
posted by Marisa Stole the Precious Thing at 7:12 PM on July 1

Maybe you're remembering Readability, which allows you to create a bookmarklet that will re-render most web pages to be much more readable.
posted by Mo Nickels at 7:25 PM on July 1 [1 favorite has favorites]

Was it Readable?
posted by null terminated at 7:26 PM on July 1

All of these are excellent suggestions, but simply selecting the print version is the closest to what I was looking for... it seems obvious in retrospect. The problem is that the second 2 tools, Readability and Readable, provide the text only version for one page at a time. If the article is several pages long, you have to return to the main page, advance, and push the button again.

Still, I vaguely remember seeing a website that did this for you, in the vein of tinyurl.com. You could give it a url, and it would return another one, which would link to a text-only version of that article.
posted by jpg15 at 11:08 AM on July 2

Well, Textise might be what you're thinking about it. It shows text version of web pages one page at a time, but you can quickly go through them. It'salso available as an add-on for Firefox.

If you go to Textise, you enter the URL of the webpage and click the textise button. It will load text only version of that webpage minus CSS or HTML formatting.

If you install the Firefox extension, then just open the webpage, open right click menu and then click on text only view (textise) option. You will see text only version of specific webpage quickly.

http://www.textise.net/
posted by mmw at 4:05 PM on July 2