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Readability

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Living in Panama has lots of pluses, but also a few minus. On the minus side, especially if you are a news junkie, is the difficultly in keeping up with what's going in the world. English language broadcasts (TV or radio) are pretty rare and the English print media even rarer in Panama. The result is that we get a lot of our news and information on the internet - all the big (traditional) outlets have a web presence, as well as smaller web only "publications". We follow what's happening in such diverse places as St. Croix (The Saint Croix Source) and Bardstown Kentucky (Kentucky Standard) along with our old hometown's Charlotte Observer.

Getting your news and information on the internet usually means a free site that's trying to pay their bills by selling ads - sometimes a LOT of ads. Can't really fault the sites, somebody has to foot the bill, but it certainly doesn't make for a great reading experience. When you read as much internet content as I do, having a TIVO like option for avoiding the clutter sure would be nice. Well . . . I may have found some help.

Readability provides the option of viewing a page without all the visual distractions and it works surprisingly well in most cases. Here is an example of what it does.

This is a screenshot of the original site (click to enlarge)
Original

and this is a screenshot of the same site after you apply Readability.
Readability Version

I find it much more enjoyable reading the latter.
Readability does get confused by site layout sometimes and doesn't allow direct navigation for articles that are more than a single page, but for most content it lives up to its name and makes content much more readable. You can even pick the background color and the font size it displays. It's also nice, in that it doesn't install anything on your computer and you only use it when you want - it's all done via a browser bookmark.

If you'd like to give Readability a try just click here to visit their site. Follow the instructions, happy reading.

Take care.
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