Show HN: chop.ax – strip sites down to just their content (opens in new tab)

(chop.ax)

6 pointsfoax1mo ago5 comments

I built web tool for accessing just the (usually text) content of sites. It handles news sites best, thanks to Mozilla's fantastic Readability library. It also supports sites that use client-side rendering, using Puppeteer. Stripped pages are cached in Redis.

My main use-case for this tool is for extreme bandwidth-constrained networks, eg Meshtastic (with an internet gateway).

5 comments

KomoD1mo ago

I would at least keep some of the styling, it usually doesn't take up that much if you strip unused selectors and makes it so much more usable. I'd also remove the inputs and buttons (since you can't use them anyway), like on https://chop.ax/https://abc.net.au

Stuff like images, SVGs are also preserved on some sites: https://chop.ax/https://doc.rust-lang.org/stable/nomicon/ind... and https://chop.ax/https://cppreference.com

A lot of the listed sites don't work and just return "Origin returned HTTP 403". Reddit also doesn't work.

foaxOP1mo ago

Aye I think it's struggling on the VPS I've got it running on. Was working much better on my laptop, so might bump it up to a dedi.

KomoD1mo ago

The 403s aren't from your VPS being unable to handle it if that's what you thought, that's from the websites blocking you.

japaco1mo ago

Nice. Have you considered if you took a step further to take the stripped down page content and format it for delivery via AI audio reader? Might be an interesting twist.

foaxOP1mo ago

I often use a screen reader to help with dyslexia, and I think many screen readers will do this already. Though, the mess that index pages become with this tool might actually make it more difficult for them! I'll keep working on the strip logic, but it's quite a manual process at the moment.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

5 comments

KomoD1mo ago

Stuff like images, SVGs are also preserved on some sites: https://chop.ax/https://doc.rust-lang.org/stable/nomicon/ind... and https://chop.ax/https://cppreference.com

A lot of the listed sites don't work and just return "Origin returned HTTP 403". Reddit also doesn't work.

foaxOP1mo ago

Aye I think it's struggling on the VPS I've got it running on. Was working much better on my laptop, so might bump it up to a dedi.

KomoD1mo ago

The 403s aren't from your VPS being unable to handle it if that's what you thought, that's from the websites blocking you.

japaco1mo ago

Nice. Have you considered if you took a step further to take the stripped down page content and format it for delivery via AI audio reader? Might be an interesting twist.

foaxOP1mo ago

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse