Website
guardian.gyford.com
OK so this one only makes the Guardian more readable but with the Times disappearing behind a pay wall and the rest having pretty rubbish online presences, it’s the one you want. It’s been made by an independent chap who has taken all the publicly available articles and put them in a simple javascript template.

It removes all the normal web clutter that come with choosing an article and replaces them with a real-life-newspaper choice of “read” or “turn the page”? It loads super-fast, is easy on the eye and has a nifty little guide to how long the article is and how far through “the paper” you are.

Browser
Safari 5
Apple’s latest browser is a fairly standard update (with the usual performance improvement boasts) but it has one feature that is worth its salt: Safari Reader. Visit any site with articles or blog pages and the browser will magically know, causing a button marked “reader” to appear. Click that, the adverts fade away and you get a lightbox-style overlay of the article in just serif text on a white background (plus any images). Click anywhere else and it’s back to the normal page. It’s clever, elegant (it is Apple) and a grown up way of reading the web.

Bookmarklet
lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability
For the uninitiated, a bookmarklet is a useful little bit of code that you drag onto your browser’s toolbar and when pressed will do a clever bit of web magic. In this case it strips everything out of the page apart from the content. Kind of like turning off the style sheet except you can customise things a bit. Before you do stick it on your toolbar you can choose the style (who knew eBook had it’s own style?), set the type size and choose how wide you want it.

The great advantage of this tool is that it works on any website (news source or not) and with any browser. Literally transforming the whole web.

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