Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The relationship between Readability and Instapaper

marco.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 55 posts

Re: The relationship between Readability and Instapaper

#41

Post by ronnier »

jorde wrote: post #24
ronnier wrote: post #9

The reason I don't develop my ViewText any further is that the barrier to entry for this is just to low. Marco already has an excellent app, now reability will enter his market, along with Apple. Here's an example: http://viewtext.org/article?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.marco.org%2...

ViewText is really good. If you have stopped development, why not dump the code to GitHub? Open source community could use a good text extractor as most of the current ones are pretty bad on server side and Readability's old code requires browser components to work well.

I'm always ashamed of my code.

Re: The relationship between Readability and Instapaper

#42

Post by ronnier »

haraball wrote: post #36
ronnier wrote: post #9

The reason I don't develop my ViewText any further is that the barrier to entry for this is just to low. Marco already has an excellent app, now reability will enter his market, along with Apple. Here's an example: http://viewtext.org/article?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.marco.org%2...

I'm using Viewtext mainly to get the full posts from RSS-feeds into my reader, and it is excellent for that! It does not work on all the feeds I want to follow, but the majority is covered. Maybe this is something you could focus more on if you feel that the Instapaper/readability-functionality is already too crowded?

That's not a bad idea. I might do that :)

Re: The relationship between Readability and Instapaper

#43

Post by ronnier »

oz wrote: post #37
ronnier wrote: post #9

The reason I don't develop my ViewText any further is that the barrier to entry for this is just to low. Marco already has an excellent app, now reability will enter his market, along with Apple. Here's an example: http://viewtext.org/article?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.marco.org%2...

Wow, I never new the creator of ViewText was on HN! You have NO IDEA how much your site has helped me, particularly on my crappy BlackBerry browser. Thank you.

Yup! I created it for hacker news. While I was making http://ihackernews.com (HN for mobile), I wanted an easy way to view the text of articles, so I made VT.

Re: The relationship between Readability and Instapaper

#44

Post by mazuhl »

ronnier wrote: post #40
alvarez wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slightly off-topic: Thanks for ViewText. Seriously. The barrier to entry may be low, but you are the one who developed it. It works flawlessly, it's fast, it's a delight to use on a mobile device and on the iPad, it doesn't attempt to distract me with ads or premium offers and it's free. If you don't me asking, how much does it cost to run ViewText?

Thank you. It's about $60 a month to host all my sites. Including http://ihackernews.com and http://ronnie.me

You should create a tip jar. I use ViewText 3 or 4 times a day. If I go to a website and there's no print view or there's a load of crud I don't want to print I hit the bookmarklet and ViewText makes it all look good.

Re: The relationship between Readability and Instapaper

#45

Post by abrowne »

ChrisArchitect wrote: post #6

wow, and this didn't even touch on Evernote's Clearly. Busy day in the 'easy mobile reading' space.

Which appears to be derived from Readable[1], based on how the reading view slides over the page and some comments in the extension's js files.

[1]: http://readable.tastefulwords.com/

Re: The relationship between Readability and Instapaper

#46

Post by abrowne »

albertogh wrote: post #35
tszming wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Readability's code is a little bit old (2009), but seems no other better (opensource) alternatives... And thanks for suggesting Diffbot, will try later.

C implementation and Python bindings, opensourced one hour ago https://github.com/fiam/readable

Maybe the name is generic enough, but I'm wondering if you're aware of Readable[1].

[1]: http://readable.tastefulwords.com/

Re: The relationship between Readability and Instapaper

#47

Post by ronnier »

minikomi wrote: post #31
ronnier wrote: post #9

The reason I don't develop my ViewText any further is that the barrier to entry for this is just to low. Marco already has an excellent app, now reability will enter his market, along with Apple. Here's an example: http://viewtext.org/article?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.marco.org%2...

Sorry for derailing - is the text of the bookmarklet available somewhere so I can edit it into an iPhone bookmark?

javascript: (function () {window.location = 'http://viewtext.org/article?url= + encodeURIComponent(window.location.href);})()

Re: The relationship between Readability and Instapaper

#48

Post by scott_s »

ronnier wrote: post #41
jorde wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ViewText is really good. If you have stopped development, why not dump the code to GitHub? Open source community could use a good text extractor as most of the current ones are pretty bad on server side and Readability's old code requires browser components to work well.

I'm always ashamed of my code.

You're clearly not ashamed of what your code can do, since you showed us the above with no hesitation. (And you shouldn't be, of course.) So why be ashamed of the code that accomplishes it?

Re: The relationship between Readability and Instapaper

#49

Post by joeguilmette »

lyso wrote: post #32
joeguilmette wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so it does. holy shit. i wonder how many articles I've only read a piece of because I thought Instapaper was stitching!

Exactly. It is a problem - I respect that Marco doesn't want to stich articles together, but I sometimes reach the end of an article to find myself unsure as to whether that really was the end, or just the end of page one. Would be useful to get some indication in Instapaper when this is the case. I am flirting with Readability for this reason.

after realizing that Instapaper doesn't do this I emailed Marco and then signed up for Readability. I've yet to decide if it's worth $60 a year for a Kindle digest, it probably isn't. I'll just send the articles one by one (ugh) and then throw them in a collection. oh well.

Re: The relationship between Readability and Instapaper

#50

Post by joeguilmette »

famousactress wrote: post #13

I'm totally confused by the apparent consensus sentiment going around on this. I adore Instapaper. I think it's unbelievably well done, I use it, and I don't have plans to look elsewhere.. that said, I can't say I worry or get sad about people who develop competing products. Seriously? It's ridiculous to react that way. First of all, I find it patronizing. Marco's really fucking good at what he does. If it turns out…

i down voted you because your comment was a little rambunctious and didn't really make a whole lot of sense.
Post reply on HN