Instapaper like article extractor demo now online

Nice! I worked on something similar a year ago but for the Ruby world. If you're on a Unix with Ruby installed (e.g. OS X), you can mostly repeat the linked demo like so:

    gem install pismo
    pismo http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/09/twitter-ios/ title lede author datetime body

And then enjoy the output. No image pick out, but it's the first IMG tag in the 'html_body'.. just never got around to implementing it as I didn't need that feature.

The downside is I haven't worked on it for months and it's in sore need of improvements. For its current in-production use though, it's proving sufficient and a reasonable option for Rubyists. More info at https://github.com/peterc/pismo

Not knocking Jim's work on Plush, btw, he's actively working on it so if Java works out for you, stick to him! :)

One thing I've always wanted is something to extract multi-page forum threads and render them in a normalized readable way. For example, Reddit comment threads like IAMAs.

Anyone know of a service or library that does that?

it didn't extract images for the sites i tried. all wordpress blogs. EDIT: i just realized why. those blogs are pulling images from flickr.

How is this different from the myriad of other text extraction services, APIs and libraries out there?

Cool! I really like how accurate it is; works with almost every site I try. :)

Nice work!

Everything I try gives a 404.