Do you get distracted when reading an online article?
Posted by Ron Harris on Sat, Jan 08, 2011
I used to find myself distracted while reading online articles. While reading an article, I would find something of interest on the page and before I finished the article, I would jump to another page. It might be something related to the article I was reading, but most of the time it was completely unrelated. Online content is often surrounded by lots of things designed to draw your attention to them. Most of the distractions are advertisements designed to encourage you to stop what you're doing and go where they want you to go.
If I'm not careful I navigate away from the article I want to read and waste time reading irrevelant pages of information. It takes me a good amount of time re-focus on the article I started out reading.
At least that's how things worked before I found a simple utility from Arc90 called Readability.
Let me tell you how I read articles on the web today. A friend of mine writes for Forbes and I found a link to his latest article on LinkedIn. Clicking the link took me to a page filled with distractions, noise and clutter.
This page was filled with distractions and shiny bobbles put there to distract me from my goal of reading Gene's article about why he is moving his business to the cloud.
All was not lost. With Readability installed in my browser, I click the shortcut in the toolbar and Readability works its magic by removing the distractions.
No distractions at all, just the content of the article. I could easily read this article and get the information I needed from it.
Readability handles longer articles with ease. Publishers divide one article and put its parts on several pages so they can display more ads. Readability presents all the pages from the pages in a single view without the distractions.
Another feature of Readability is that I can print the clean view of the online content if I want a hardcopy for my files. Or, by changing the printer, I can print an article to a PDF file for electronic reference.
An option to hide any inline links within the online content is available. Inline links appear as footnotes at the end of the article. You see a footnote entry in the article that refers to a link at the end of the article.
I do research online looking for articles I can use to prepare a blog post or create a script for a talk or presentation. I upload the PDF files I create with Readability to Evernote, another one of my favorite tools, to archive the reference materials. I can search Evernote for words inside of PDF files (or other files I upload) which means I can search for "Microsoft Office" or "QuickBooks" or "GoldMine" and Gene's article will pop up for my review. Evernote works on PCs, Macs, iPhones and iPads and other platforms. All the files in Evernote are available from any computer or device. There is a free version that offers these capabilities.
Arc90 has some new features planned for release in the near future. One feature I hope shows up is the ability to send links to online content that will open in the Readability view. Wouldn't it be great to go directly to the article you want to read without ever seeing the distractions? Not bad for a free utility that works on Internet Explorer, Safari and other browsers.
Let me know what you think about Readability. Pass this information along to anyone you think would benefit from fewer distractions and who wants to stop acting like they have attention deficit disorder.
Related Resources:
Arc90: The home page with other cool applications from the developers of Readability.
Readability: Go here to learn more about Readability and install the application.
Watch the following video to see Readability in action how to install it in Windows Internet Explorer:
Evernote: My all time favorite tool for cataloging information.
Read Gene Mark's article on why he's Moving to the Cloud.
Harris Technology focuses on providing on-premise and cloud-based customer relationship management solutions such as Microsoft Dynamics CRM or Sage SalesLogix to a wide variety of clients of all sizes.