My New Daily Newspaper
I enjoy reading a daily newspaper; but gave up on my lame local paper years ago. I have enjoyed the ability to read news and commentary from all over the world here on the internet and count on aggregation sites like The Drudge Report to point out interesting content elsewhere. Unfortunately, I just want the text to read and find all the gee-whiz graphics, videos, banners, ads, etc. irritating and distracting. I use the Firefox browser and eliminate most of it with Adblock Plus and especially NoScript (which Troy turned me onto a few years ago) add-ons.
Recently, I have installed a new add-on called “Read-it-Later” that is marvelous. When installed, it puts a gold chevron shaped tool button in the upper right beside the search field and the outline of one within the URL field beside the bookmark star. Then, when surfing one lands on a page one wishes to read later, but would not necessarily wish to bookmark, clicking on the empty chevron fills it and places it’s link in a reading list accessed by clicking on the tool button. One cool thing for me is that it keeps my reading list online and synced between my desktop and my laptop from anywhere.
More importantly, one can also right click on a link and select “Read This Link Later” to add it to the list without even opening it. I can and do quickly go through Drudge or other aggregation sites marking interesting links for reading later. I now do this even if I intend to read it immediately, because of its neatest feature.
When one opens the reading list and points the cursor at a link, to the right an icon of a capital “T” appears. If one clicks on the “T” rather than the link, a superb text parser displays just the article’s text, full page, somewhat similar to the “Printer Friendly Format” available on some sites. No pictures, no graphics, no ads, etc. Awesome. For old eyes, <Ctrl-+> a few times zooms the text to a readable font size with text wrapping changing as appropriate. It seems to work on most sites flawlessly, although for those which use “Read More” multi-page formats to force more page views, it may parse only the first page.
Now, for the newspaper. I happened to be watching Fox News yesterday when Rupert Murdoch and Apple formally introduced his new online newspaper called simply “The Daily.” It is available for a subscription price of 99¢ per week, but only on an Ipad. Now, I have been looking for an excuse to get an Ipad, and this may be it; but the Ipad II is coming out in the Spring and I will wait until then to decide. Meanwhile, it would be nice to check-out the quality of “The Daily.”
Then, this evening I stumbled across: The Daily: Indexed, which also archives past issues. It will be interesting to see Murdoch’s reaction to this site. I wouldn’t be surprised if it get’s shut down by his lawyers; but then it might be useful to hook potential customers for the future who do not yet have an Ipad. In any case, Read-it-Later’s text parser works beautifully on its news and opinion articles. I will be visiting it daily as long as it lasts.
Check it out while you still can. Murdoch has invested millions in this venture, which he sees as the newspaper of the future. He has reportedly staffed it with some serious journalistic talent. So far it looks pretty good, and I haven’t even seen all the cool graphics, 360 degree pictures, etc. that are supposed to be dazzle the Ipad kids. I’ll stick to the text. 🙂 â—„Daveâ–º
