Posts Tagged: web design

improve your web reading experience

On 15 June 2010 by matthew With 0 Comments - technology

I read a lot of arti­cles on dif­fer­ent sites — main­stream media and blogs — and one of the pri­mary page ele­ments that takes away from my read­ing expe­ri­ence is the vary­ing fonts and dis­tract­ing mate­r­ial sur­round­ing the arti­cle. I recently stum­bled upon Read­abil­ity by arc 90 labs. As you’ll see in the video below, Read­abil­ity quickly con­verts web con­tent into a sim­ple, easy-to-read for­mat. You have sev­eral options to chose from for your view, and all you have to do is add Readability’s book­mark to your browser.

Now, I’m sure there are times when you’ll want to retain the mate­r­ial accom­pa­ny­ing an arti­cle, but I find Read­abil­ity use­ful when I want to focus on the arti­cle. Here’s an example.

Orig­i­nal NY Times Page View

nytimes1

Read­abil­ity View


NY Times - Readability View

You can eas­ily switch back to the orig­i­nal view by click­ing the back but­ton on the top left of the page. The other but­tons allow you to print the arti­cle or send it via e-mail Unfor­tu­nately, the e-mail option merely sends a link to the orig­i­nal arti­cle. I would have pre­ferred that it sent the arti­cle in the Read­abil­ity view. I’m sure copy­right laws don’t allow that con­ver­sion, though. I chose the option to have hyper­links con­verted to foot­notes, although I noticed on link did not get con­verted on the page.

If you already use Read­abil­ity, or give it a try, please let me know what you think.

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wardrobe change

On 23 January 2010 by matthew With 0 Comments - business

If you have vis­ited my blog before, you will notice that there is a new look and feel. I was talk­ing with a friend yes­ter­day about the pre­vi­ous lay­out, and com­mented that I thought it felt a lit­tle dark. He smiled and quickly agreed. FYI — I really appre­ci­ate candor. 

This is not the best exam­ple because it’s using the ‘lights’ instead of the wood back­ground I used. I should have grabbed a screen cap­ture of the old lay­out before mak­ing the change.

So, this morn­ing I scanned through a num­ber of tem­plates and installed the one you see now.  It feels brighter and a bit more stream­lined. It also has a nice fea­ture — in the top right cor­ner — that allows you to expand the blog to full screen width. Click the <> and the blog will expand. Click it again and it will return to a cen­tered lay­out.  I am still try­ing to fig­ure out why the text enlarge­ment fea­ture is not work­ing. (The AA ) in the top right, as well. I sus­pect it may have been “lost in trans­la­tion” when the theme was con­verted from a Word­Press format.

So, give me you feed­back. What do you think of this new layout?

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