YSK theres a open source tool to cleanly read webpage articles called 'NewsWaffle'

Submitted ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨Smokeydope@lemmy.world⁩ to ⁨youshouldknow@lemmy.world⁩

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/06bf082b-b9e6-4c4b-9176-e9754588e954.png

YSK because webpages are increasingly bloated from excessive trackers, popups, sidebars, and more. This diminishes the experience of reading, eats up your precious internet data, and threatens your privacy. Image Newswaffle is a public service that intelligently strips webpages of their cruft and leaves only the valuable text content. Its based in gemtext and was originally intended to be accessed using the gemini protocol, however it can easily be proxied to HTML for normal web browser usage.

Newswaffle Homepage (proxied)

Newswaffle github

SmolNet Portal Proxy github

Image

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Comments

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reseller_pledge609@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
This is really cool.

Takes some getting used to when you’re used to all of the links and other garbage in and around articles, but I’m sure anyone could learn to love this.

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uncle_moustache@sh.itjust.works ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
(How) is this different from Reader mode in Firefox?

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- Smokeydope@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  They are similar and use some of the same underlying technology powered by the readability library, but newswaffle gives more options on how to render the article (article mode, link mode, raw mode), it isolates images and gives them their own external url link you can click on, it tells you exactly how much cruft it saved from original webpage (something about seeing 99.x% lighter makes my brain tingle good chemicals). It works well with article indexes. Hope these examples help.
  
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  - acockworkorange@mander.xyz ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    That’s really good, but it suffers from having a “good enough” competitor built in. You’re already using an ad block that prevents loading ads, trackers and other nasties. Then you click Reader mode to get to a result that works well enough most of the time. A lot more convenient than handling finding a website to paste a link into, let alone self hosting a tool.
    
    What this project needs is a browser extension to make it more convenient.
    
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teft@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Or just use reader mode on firefox which does the same thing without an extra service

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- Smokeydope@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  Not every device with a built in web browser has reader view (like the kobo I showed). I believe firefox reader requires you download the whole webpage first and then post formats. Newswaffle is useful If your limited on data, don’t want your connection touching the servers of the news site, or just like how it formats sites over a reader view.
  
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- WhatAmLemmy@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  You can’t use Firefox reader on an e-reader or cli, numbnuts.
  
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  - teft@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    Oh look, another rude jackass for the block list.
    
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  - real_squids@sopuli.xyz ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    why not? plenty of them run android, do they maintain a blacklist of sorts?
    
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letraset@feddit.dk ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
This is what I’ve been looking for for a very long time. It’s amazing, thank you for sharing 😍

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solrize@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Nice, I wrote one of those a few years ago for some specific sites, and another thing that rewrites links to get rid of tracking parameters and other stuff. But Newswaffle sounds more sophisticated, so maybe I can switch or merge.

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will_a113@lemm.ee ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
I wonder if the archive.ph guys would be willing to host this as an alternate rendering option. They’re already doing archival downloading and reformatting, and I bet a lot of their users would appreciate having a totally unencumbered view like this.

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NarrativeBear@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Can something like this be self-hosted, would definitely like to run this in my local network.

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- Smokeydope@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  Yes it absolutely can! I linked the githubs with open source codes. Unfortunately I don’t think theres any precompiled executables for newswaffle its just source written in vscode. I’m only a hobbyist and not really familiar with compiling vscode but was hoping a more knowledgeable person could figure it out.
  
  Not sure about portal.mozz source I haven’t looked to hard into it yet but hoping its easier.
  
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  - NarrativeBear@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    Thank you, I will keep tabs on this project. Hopefully someone smarter than me might be able to release a docker image of this project at somepoint.
    
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neblem@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Neat to see more tools like this out there.

Great for any retromachines that can’t / won’t run the modern web (and things like Lynx and EWW) and accessibility purposes.

I’ll have to take a look at how it’s parsing the pages. Brow.sh is usually my goto for these use cases, but that’s using a whole Firefox to do the rendering.

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