Did you know about the Readability bookmarklet? If you’re looking at a blog post, newspaper article, magazine piece, or any similar kind of web page, you could press the button and it would make the page incredibly more readable. It cuts out all the stuff at the top, bottom, left, and right, and just leaves you with the real content.
I just found out there is also a Readability extension for Firefox. If you’re a Firefox user, I highly recommend it. When you’re looking at a blog post, article, or whatever, you can either click the little R button or press Ctrl-Alt-r and the web page will change into the no-ad no-cruft version and be instantly more readable.
For example, here’s a Lifehacker article, Keep Your Eyes on Their Feet to Cut Through Crowds Like Butter, before and after:
Before
You can’t even see the text of the post, there’s so much stuff on the page! But watch what happens when you turn on Readability:
After
It’s a great little tool to cut out distractions when you need to focus!
