Structure in the flow

I just discovered Readability via the Academic Productivity blog. Similar in intention to the Aardvark extension I posted about a few months ago, it allows you to reformat a page for easier reading: grab only the main content, change the font to a format of your choice. All through a configurable bookmarklet. In contrast to Aardvark, though, Readability does all of this automatically.

I tried it on a few sites I visit frequently and it seems pretty solid for the most part. On the other hand, it failed on this page. Creating an algorithm to find the main content is quite hard, though, which is why I thought previously a program automating the procedure would not surface. Yet I think it’s still a valuable tool: try it on a page; if it works: great, otherwise use something like Aardvark or deal with dancing bananas and ads for ever more efficient diets.