It's like reading, but better

Like most children of the 1980s, I was raised on a nutritious cultural diet of MTV and video games. Naturally, this means I have a blissfully short attention span and I am easily distracted. Before I forget who you are and what I'm writing about or I rush away to gaze at the pandas grazing outside my window, I should point out that I'm not some illiterate chav. I love reading and the Web is full of interesting stuff to read from acres of news at Google News to the free, public domain books at Project Gutenberg. Unfortunately, reading a lot of content available on the Web is a royal pain.

A lot of content available to read online is free, but this is only made possible by advertising. Unfortunately, some websites are littered with lots of ads which clutter up the page. Chances are, they're also very distracting since a lot of them are animated and will run in a perpetual loop. Obviously, that content might not be free without advertising, but that doesn't give advertisers free reign to induce an epileptic fit when I'm least expecting it.

On top of it all, a lot of text online is poorly laid out in small, badly chosen fonts. I could just give up and read a magazine or a book, but that would be defeatism and if Margaret Thatcher and endless re-runs of The Mysterious Cities of Gold have taught me anything, it's that stubbornness always pays off in the end.

Readability is a handy little Javascript applet that makes websites much easier to read. Once you've chosen the page layout, font size and margin size to suit you at the Readability webpage, an applet is generated that is stored in your browser's bookmarks toolbar. When you come across a visually offensive webpage that you nonetheless want to read, just click the Readability icon in your toolbar and the webpage is instantly reformatted into a far more readable form. If you want to see the original layout, just reload the page.

As my pictured example shows, the reformatted page can be a vast improvement over the original. Readability doesn't always work, especially on particularly complex webpage layouts, but it's a handy tool to have nonetheless and is quicker and more convenient than using ad blockers and manually resizing text.

Now that I've solved that little quandary, I'd like to move onto my proposed solution for the long-standing animosity between Russia and Georgia over the breakaway territories of Abkhazia and South Oss… OMG! PANDAZ GRAZING OUTSIDE MY WINDOW!!!!1111111