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.
Newswaffle is a public service created by Acidus 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 very easily be reformated to HTML and proxied through HTTP for normal web browser usage. The proxy I am using is SmolNet Portal by Mozz.
If you have a kobo e-ink ereader or similar device with extremely simple web browser its invaluable for getting a modern webpage to render correctly.
Source Code
YSK because the people who made these tools and host them on their own time and dime, may not be around forever. Only a few other people on this planet know these tools exist or actively use them. There are only one public instance of these services running thanks to the makers themselves. Ideally we need some self hosters to deploy and fork these tools to ensure they exist in the future. That can’t happen if nobody knows about them.
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.
(How) is this different from Reader mode in Firefox?
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. You can bookmark a newswaffle page to get reader view by default instead of clicking a button in firefox toolbar. Hope these examples help.
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.
This is what I’ve been looking for for a very long time. It’s amazing, thank you for sharing 😍
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.
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.
Can something like this be self-hosted, would definitely like to run this in my local network.
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.
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.
I think ill email Acidus and ask if they can get something going on. Thanks for the interest!
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.
Or just use reader mode on firefox which does the same thing without an extra service
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.
You can’t use Firefox reader on an e-reader or cli, numbnuts.
why not? plenty of them run android, do they maintain a blacklist of sorts?
Oh look, another rude jackass for the block list.
Or just don’t be a “rude jackass” and discredit entire projects when you don’t know what you’re talking about?
