HOWTO streamline your browser for easier reading

April 10th, 2010 in Micro Blog. Weblog

I read a lot these days, much of it online. And while there is a lot of great writing on the nets, most of it suffers from inconsistent and limited type layout and design. Google Reader improves things by applying a single design to many sites, but Reader’s font and layout choices are problematic for longer reading sessions.

Take Gruber’s site (second panel). His longer pieces are usually worth reading, but his site is less than readable (especially on my laptop on a sunny day). The low contrast and small fonts are a good aesthetic that aren’t sustainable for my epic Saturday morning reading sessions. Google Reader’s rendition of Gruber’s work is pretty weak too (Ariel, smallish fonts, very noisy page).

Luckily there are a number of tools to solve the problem:

Re-Reader

Available as a user script, stylesheet, or bookmarklet, Re-Reader strips Google Reader down to the bare essentials, and repairs the fonts and layout. I use Re-Reader when poring through my feeds before I leave for the office in the morning, as it is easy on the eyes and it lets me focus on reading.

Readability, Readability 2, and Clippable

These are available as bookmarklets, which will boil down any web page to the bare text, laying it out in a very readable format. I use these tools when people send me links to articles on noisy sites. The original Readability tool has several options that let you pick how it cleans up the text. Readability 2 (renamed Clippable recently) has a set of keyboard shortcuts to customize the layouts.

Instapaper

Instapaper is a special tool. Not only does it clean up how a page looks, it lets you queue stuff up to read later. I use it to save longer articles for reading in the evenings, often weeks later. It’s especially handy for fiction and papers, as it remembers where you were last, and it has an archive so you can read something again later. Instapaper even has iPhone and iPad clients that focus on readability and reading.