Make Annoying Websites Easy to Read with 'Readability' Bookmarklet

I always think blogs are like dresses we wear, it may look good on us but we are not the ones that seeing it all the time. Readability of websites is very important if you want to retain your visitors. But since many websites ignore the visitors and keep building on their sites all kinds of stuff on to it makes it real hard for us to read it properly. One typical example is Huffingtonpost.com, it has too much information that fills the screen all at one time. Some other sites have annoying ads that fills up the entire screen and then they mask the close button somewhere within it.

How to avoid this reading mess? There is a great tool called "Readability" bookmarklet that makes the job easier for us by eliminating everything except the main article.

David Pogue of New York Times suggested this tool and he said it eliminates flash ads, links, banners, and promotions, pop up-windows etc.

Once we set the settings (style, size and margin) in Readability website (how we want to view any website), it helps us create a bookmarklet. Just drag the bookmarklet into your bookmark toolbar and place it there. When you visit any website in the future and if you see any annoying web layout and ads, click the "Readability" bookmarklet. It removes all the extra things in the web page and gives us a simple plain layout.

Here is an example:

There are three tools you see on top-left of the page (above picture), the first one is you can click the refresh arrow sign to see the original article and the other two buttons to either email the article or print the clean article for you to read them later.

Pogue says about this tool:

You occasionally run into a Web page that Readability doesn't handle right - no big deal, just refresh the page to see the original. But most of the time, Readability makes the world online a calmer, cleaner, more beautiful place.