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Comment by ronnier | Hacker News Reader

The reason I don't develop my ViewText any further is that the barrier to entry for this is just to low. Marco already has an excellent app, now reability will enter his market, along with Apple.

Here's an example: http://viewtext.org/article?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.marco.org%2...

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ViewText is really good. If you have stopped development, why not dump the code to GitHub? Open source community could use a good text extractor as most of the current ones are pretty bad on server side and Readability's old code requires browser components to work well.

+1 for open sourcing it (from another ViewText user who also happened to need good open source text extractor).

BTW, what programming language you used for ViewText?

I'm always ashamed of my code.

You're clearly not ashamed of what your code can do, since you showed us the above with no hesitation. (And you shouldn't be, of course.) So why be ashamed of the code that accomplishes it?

Yep, function over form. And the function part is fantastic in this case

Slightly off-topic: Thanks for ViewText. Seriously. The barrier to entry may be low, but you are the one who developed it. It works flawlessly, it's fast, it's a delight to use on a mobile device and on the iPad, it doesn't attempt to distract me with ads or premium offers and it's free.

If you don't me asking, how much does it cost to run ViewText?

Thank you. It's about $60 a month to host all my sites. Including http://ihackernews.com and http://ronnie.me

You should create a tip jar. I use ViewText 3 or 4 times a day. If I go to a website and there's no print view or there's a load of crud I don't want to print I hit the bookmarklet and ViewText makes it all look good.

I'm using Viewtext mainly to get the full posts from RSS-feeds into my reader, and it is excellent for that! It does not work on all the feeds I want to follow, but the majority is covered.

Maybe this is something you could focus more on if you feel that the Instapaper/readability-functionality is already too crowded?

That's not a bad idea. I might do that :)

how do you do that?

do you wrap the feed's url in viewtext's api url, and provide that to the reader?

ViewText accepts RSS feeds

Wow, I never new the creator of ViewText was on HN! You have NO IDEA how much your site has helped me, particularly on my crappy BlackBerry browser.

Thank you.

Yup! I created it for hacker news. While I was making http://ihackernews.com (HN for mobile), I wanted an easy way to view the text of articles, so I made VT.

Sorry for derailing - is the text of the bookmarklet available somewhere so I can edit it into an iPhone bookmark?

javascript: (function () {window.location = 'http://viewtext.org/article?url= + encodeURIComponent(window.location.href);})()

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