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Comment by jbob2000 | Hacker News Reader

jbob2000

I wanted to read your article, but the design of your blog really sucks. I can hardly read the text, it's quite small. Monospace fonts are great for programming, bad for reading. Animated gifs every 5 lines is really annoying.

Sorry!

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I hate to be negative, but am doing so in hopes that the author will improve. I had the same experience. With the animated gifs every paragraph, it gives the feel of being one of those Buzzfeed articles where one has to click through to eleven different pages to see the whole list. Really couldn't read any of it due to the distraction and style choices.

Buzzfeed doesn’t use slideshows. All the content is on one page.

Not that it absolves the owner of the site, but Readability mode is built just for sites like this.

Still doesn't help the gifs though.

Sorry to ask, but what is readability mode and how do I use it. I googled, but due to SEO I get a ton of results.

It's a Firefox feature. That feature alone made me switch to FF for browsing.

Also in Safari, it's the little 3-line icon in the URL bar.

Many browsers have a "reading" mode or extension that strips CSS and pictures. Safari Reader is built in, Firefox and Chrome have an extension called Readability that you can install.

It's built into firefox as far as I know, it's on the right hand end of the uri bar for me.

Holy cow I've used Firefox since it was called Mozilla browser and was owned by Netscape and I've never seen that a reader mode was built in.

I'm an idiot.

It's one of the best things about the browser on mobile phones. I never have an issue with weird JavaScript pop ups or sites that are not movie friendly.

don't feel so bad, I am in the same boat. I remember loading up Netscape to my 486 with a 3.5 floppy

Readability is a browser feature that extracts the text of a website and displays it in a pre-defined, easy to read way. Safari calls this feature “Reader”[1].

[1] https://support.apple.com/kb/PH21467?locale=en_US

I found the gifs really obnoxious. Yes we get it, it's an article about Mechanical Turk and the guy from Scrubs is named Turk. Wow! No need to repeat the same "joke" EIGHT times.

I ended up using dev-tools to delete all the gifs. I can live with play-once-then-stop, but the continual repeated movement was distracting.

document.querySelectorAll('img').forEach((im) => { im.style.display = 'none'; })

+ document.body.style.backgroundColor = 'white'; = can read now

Just press ESC and the gifs will stop

EDIT: Seems like I'm years behind https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=825486

It's stop() now.

I write bookmarklets for things like this. Someone already posted some code below. They have the benefit of being quick to write, bespoke to my needs and low overhead.

I came here to say the same thing. I had to stop reading, the gifs were WAY too much.

I feel like the information in the article is incredibly useful, but like you, I found the gifs distracting to the point of absurdity. I've never seen this show, but is it good enough such that you would have it strewn all over your good information? The font choice and color definitely didn't help. I guess it is the whole signal to noise question in action.

I am on IPad with 10% battery and the last thing I want is 10 looping childish gifs running for 15 minutes while reading

I have to concur with a lot of the others on here. I thought the content was interesting, and I really wanted to read it all and learn from it, but the colours, font sizes, and oh - those awful animated gifs just resulted in me reeling back and closing the browser window.

Very first thing I did was block the gifs with the ad blocker, they are insufferable.

Why the GIFS?!?!!?! Couldn't read for more than a minute. And I am a Scrubs fan.

Do you use the cover of a book to judge it's contents? Design wasn't that bad (at least it's not red background with blue texts).

OP don't get discouraged by one off comments like this on HN. They rarely add any real value and most of the time just personal preferences.

Your content was very informative and valuable.

I'm willing to forgive a lot, but that site is atrocious. I could care less about 'well designed' - I'm fine with black and white with boring fonts - but gifs bouncing around all over the place combined with a difficult color scheme is too much.

> Do you use the cover of a book to judge it's contents?

This is more like judging a book by its poor type-setting.

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