My favourite tool I've added to Chrome has got to be the Evernote Clearly plugin. It has completely transformed how I consume blog posts and online articles. It allows you to remove the clutter from any page design, be that adverts, navigation, tag clouds, etc and leaves you just to focus on the text on the page.
It comes with several presets allowing you to customise the font, background colour and generally tweak to give you to optimum reading experience. Plus, with a little bit of CSS magic you can completely customise the design.
Further to this if are an Evernote user, you don't have to be to use the plugin, there is a handy setting to save the article or snippets from the article straight into your Evernote account. I've yet to use this feature, however it is nice to know it is there should I want to!
Currently it's avalible in Firefox and Chrome. You can find out more information, and download it from the Evernote website, or by watching the video below.
It was this plugin that gave me a lot of the inspiration for the current design on this blog, trying to remove alot of uneeded clutter. Currently I think I went a bit far with the menu, but we live and learn, and will fix in a revision at some point. Currently on that list is making the menu more clear, switching to a serif font and adding a background colour or pattern.
How do you read articles on websites? Have you got any suggestions to improve the reading experience?
Post changelog
- 2023-12-29 – Swap out all YouTube embeds for lite-youtube
- 2022-01-08 – Add Mix, Ditch NodeSASS
- 2020-05-17 – Remove old insecure image references, hotlinks, etc
- 2020-05-17 – YouTube links http -> https
- 2020-05-17 – Decouple gulp from SCSS generation
- 2018-12-24 – Generate (but not use yet) RWD images
- 2018-09-01 – Importing all the old blog posts
