How does instapaper strip down articles?

9 points·mrkmcknz··7 comments

How does instapaper and apple reader strip down articles? I mean any other tool I use like it produces no where near as beautiful results as instapaper.

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I believe Instapaper uses a custom parsing engine for stripping content from pages.

There's a page here which lists the site specific rules Instapaper uses for extracting content:

http://www.instapaper.com/bodytext

I think this is why you see such good results from Instapaper.

Instapaper used to use some wrapper code around Readability and do all the work in the client browser.

However, I'm a bit surprised to see that Marco has moved away from this approach. If you look at the code loaded with the bookmarklet[1], you can see it seems to simply compress the page (with Base64) and send it to the server, where it must be processed now.

Likely this is done to shift the workload off the user, and make it simpler to maintain and modify.

[1] http://www.instapaper.com/j/VOvVpvxqOIFR

Take a look at ruby-readability: https://github.com/iterationlabs/ruby-readability

That's perfect thanks!

There are open source java based tools that let you do this. Can't think of any, but this isn't new...

Look at Readability.

I still wonder how they are actually stripping the documents so differently. Instapaper, readability and apple reader often look so different and on occasions one or the other will omit vital media. However, apple seems to omit media more then others.

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