Other than wanting a highlighting feature, I've been completely satisfied with this abandoned product (last update at least 2 years ago?). They nailed it for me, especially with design aesthetics.
And it had the absolute best send-to-Kindle parser: It sent an actual personal document, not a Kindle magazine, and they even managed to include article images most of the time (which other services struggle with).
:'(
1) one of the best pool of popular articles in a day - readability.com/topreads 2) best kindle send to 3) best reading mode for a browser
i feel very mildly traumatized losing readability.com/topreads. redef+longform dont quite cover everything topreads did.
for people who dont know what it was - https://web.archive.org/web/20150415110937/https://readabili...
#1 reason I stopped using Readability was their "designs".
The web app had constant bugs, especially right after their big redesign and the Android mobile version was terrible. It would pop up a notification every 5 minutes to tell you it's checking for articles, and there was no way to turn that off.
Didn't change for a year, so I dumped them and said "guess this is an abandoned product".
The parser/converter has actually stood up amazingly well considering it's seen little or no updating.
I'd run across Readability a few years ago and found it useful. There was an update to the application about 2012/2013, which as is typical, offered a few things, but also took away others which had been useful.
And then .... nothing. The Facebook page hasn't been updated since Januarey 23, 2014. The blog is ... offline. Twitter actually seems active, though I'd thought that hadn't been active either.
I really liked the concept, had issues with the execution, loved the bookmarklet (for rendering pages within a browser in "readability view"). But this had obviously been abandoned for a long, long time.
I've been slowly schlepping articles to Pocket. I guess I'll have to speed that up....
Hrm. I find this about the design firm behind Readability joining Facebook, a year ago: http://thenextweb.com/dd/2015/01/16/design-partners-behind-m...
However, a number of bloggers and content owners objected to this, and made bug fuss about it, and pretty much poisoned the "with it" tech croud on the idea of Readability.
Readability then pivoted to a more conventional read-later app and read-now service. But it never seemed to recover from its original bad press.
it really really sucks losing instapaper daily and readability top reads in the same year. imho, readability.com/topreads was one of the best surveys of what was popular in the longformish world on a given day.
Instant search, highlighting, a UI that encourages 'rediscovery' of articles that are saved but not read ("hey you, here's what you bookmarked 7 days ago") and a reading feature similar to readability. There's space here to build a product that people love and that sticks around.
Parsing web pages is proving tricky in some cases, if anybody has any library suggestions, shout.
Key feature will be easy import from every other popular bookmark service. Pull in your data in seconds, see if you like how we treat it, and make a call on switching.
It would be great to see them opening the code to the community.
Pocket do not have a Readability import tool, but there's a third-party tool their support desk just provided a URL for, caveat emptor, etc., etc.
http://hsablonniere.github.io/readability2pocket/
Among other alternatives, I'll suggest giving https://pinboard.in from @idlewords (Maciej Czeglowski) a look as well. I actually think that might have a few other features I'd want, but am parking for now at Pocket (inertia, too many damned articles, the simplified reader view is really appreciated).
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Edit: Corrected "in" for "io" as Pinboard's TLD.
What are you using to send & read web articles on your Kindle?
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stylish/fjnbnpbmke...