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Show HN: chop.ax – strip sites down to just their content (chop.ax)

6 points by foax ↗ HN
I built web tool for accessing just the (usually text) content of sites. It handles news sites best, thanks to Mozilla's fantastic Readability library. It also supports sites that use client-side rendering, using Puppeteer. Stripped pages are cached in Redis.

My main use-case for this tool is for extreme bandwidth-constrained networks, eg Meshtastic (with an internet gateway).

4 comments

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japaco
Nice. Have you considered if you took a step further to take the stripped down page content and format it for delivery via AI audio reader? Might be an interesting twist.
KomoD
I would at least keep some of the styling, it usually doesn't take up that much if you strip unused selectors and makes it so much more usable. I'd also remove the inputs and buttons (since you can't use them anyway), like on https://chop.ax/https://abc.net.au

Stuff like images, SVGs are also preserved on some sites: https://chop.ax/https://doc.rust-lang.org/stable/nomicon/ind... and https://chop.ax/https://cppreference.com

A lot of the listed sites don't work and just return "Origin returned HTTP 403". Reddit also doesn't work.

foax
Aye I think it's struggling on the VPS I've got it running on. Was working much better on my laptop, so might bump it up to a dedi.
KomoD
The 403s aren't from your VPS being unable to handle it if that's what you thought, that's from the websites blocking you.