ClipDO is a free service allowing you to send articles to Kindle (and soon to support other mobile devices).
My job as a developer for the project is to ensure that the "parser" (the part of the service that analyses the clipped webpage) correctly extracts the article whilst ignoring superfluous content (adverts, menus, comments, etc). For example, in the screenshot below The New York Times is converted from a webpage (left), to a cleanly formatted article (right). The article is then wirelessly transferred to your Kindle, ready to read:
Developing the parser is really interesting work. It's amazing how structurally different popular news sites are, and developing a "one-size-fits-all" algorithm to do this is both challenging and rewarding. We've tested the parser with hundreds of popular sites, and I think it fares very well (although if you do find a site that doesn't clip well, please drop me a line - aaron at tangaro.net).
No comments:
Post a Comment