Thanks! :) No big goals with this. Thought it'd be a useful tool, especially considering how big and bloated web sites are getting these days. So we're going to try to keep it around as it is. It's a simple wrapper around our Full-Text RSS product, which, as of the latest release, can output plain text like this. Demo of that available here: http://95.216.144.183
Hey this looks really cool. I think the typography could be improved though, check out http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/ for some inspiration/guidelines on how to accomplish that.
Seems Firefox and Chrome on mobile handle plain text differently. Firefox shows the text quite small (smaller than if it tried to fit it to device width). Chrome on Android, on the other hand, doesn't seem to try to fit the content at all, showing it at fixed scale which causes additional wrapping to the already 70-char wrapped text we output.
Happy to experiment more with CSS, but ultimately this is simply supposed to be plain text output, so optimal readability isn't really the goal here - although would be nice to improve it. :)
One of the things we do with txtify.it is try to find the content block in the HTML first, then convert only that from HTML to plain text. So in situations where the input URL is a news article or blog post, the output should be cleaner.
We'll have one up soon. But essentially no user accounts, and no logging on our servers for this service. Requested articles are cached for a few hours then deleted.
But I don't consider that a big problem - lots of sites include things like that in their content. It's annoying, but no easy way to identify them all accurately and remove them without custom rules.
That would bother people. Say you convert something that's private or not public yet. Not sure you'd want the next person to see it. I don't like it when sites do it.
Any particular aspect of the code you're interested in?
The article detection, extraction and conversion happens with our Full-Text RSS product which we sell (see link for demo in another comment). So the code here is mostly sending a HTTP request to that and asking for plain text output. The HTML to text conversion in Full-Text RSS uses the Html2Text library found here https://github.com/mtibben/html2text
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 70.0 ms ] threadSuggestion: allow larger line widths to be specified (for fewer, longer lines in large paragraphs).
But, I realised it's possible to send a stylesheet in the HTTP header. Chrome seems to ignore it, but Firefox uses it:
Seems Firefox and Chrome on mobile handle plain text differently. Firefox shows the text quite small (smaller than if it tried to fit it to device width). Chrome on Android, on the other hand, doesn't seem to try to fit the content at all, showing it at fixed scale which causes additional wrapping to the already 70-char wrapped text we output.
Happy to experiment more with CSS, but ultimately this is simply supposed to be plain text output, so optimal readability isn't really the goal here - although would be nice to improve it. :)
https://txtify.it/www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economi...
It also shows up in your example as well. Maybe you don't get bothered by it? :)
Please note: the bug is inconsistent, it pops out inconsistently.
Here's the part: "GET OUR DAILY NEWSLETTER Upgrade your inbox and get our Daily Dispatch and Editor's Picks."
Should be fixed now. We now strip that out: https://github.com/fivefilters/ftr-site-config/blob/master/e...
But I don't consider that a big problem - lots of sites include things like that in their content. It's annoying, but no easy way to identify them all accurately and remove them without custom rules.
liked the project by the way!
The article detection, extraction and conversion happens with our Full-Text RSS product which we sell (see link for demo in another comment). So the code here is mostly sending a HTTP request to that and asking for plain text output. The HTML to text conversion in Full-Text RSS uses the Html2Text library found here https://github.com/mtibben/html2text