Do you love reading the latest articles on the web? Do you have a phone or other mobile device that can access the web but only in limited ways? Tidyread.com is the answer to your dilemma!
Tidyread.com provides a very simple but very powerful service for free: It converts complex web pages that include flash animations, sounds, and other powerful features into basic text pages so you can read them from any mobile device that has basic web access.
My phone, for example, can access the internet but can’t handle loading large pages that have all those complex additions that make the pages so pretty and flashy.
One of my favorite web sites is www.IGN.com. I love to keep up on the latest gaming news, as well as research vintage games to play on my jalaptopy (jalopy+laptop). Sadly, the browser on my phone is weak and limited, and can only handle basic WAP (Wireless Access Protocol) formatted pages. Now, when mobile devices first started accessing the web, many page developers would create a separate page file in WAP format, which would automatically load when the main site was accessed by a mobile phone or other WAP capable device. But, with the advent of Android OS and Opera and other, more powerful browsers on mobile devices, and the addition of more processing power and memory capabilities in the devices themselves, most page developers have stopped doing this. That means that those of us running on ancient (i.e. more than a year old) mobile technology are left by the wayside and are usually frustrated to the point of giving up on accessing the web via mobile device.
Well we need suffer no more! Just fire up the browser on your mobile device, go to tidyread.com and you’ll find a web form with a single box. Enter the URL for your favorite site in the box, submit it, and away you go! Tidyread.com scans the URL you entered, organizes the links found on it into simple text links, and continues to do so throughout your browsing session. This lets you read those articles that you would normally not be able to see because you’d get that dreaded “Not Enough Memory, Application Closing” message, or whatever it’s equivalent is on your mobile device.
I tested this on a number of my favorite sites, including www.IGN.com, which is absolutely full of flash menus and animations, huge screenshot files (more than 1MB is huge for my phone’s browser), and other snazzy items that my phone’s browser can’t handle. Using Tidyread.com, however, I found a listing of categories and picked “New Releases”. I was taken to a list of games that came out recently, chose one, and was taken to a mostly text article that my mobile browser was able to load and read. Tidyread.com even found some screenshots in the article and converted them to a size that I was able to load and view!
Additional benefits of Tidyread.com include faster load times on slow networks or roaming networks, as well as the simplicity of cutting through all the flash and glitter and getting right to the meat of any web page or article. The main page at Tidyread.com also offers a listing of various news and information sites that work quite well with Tidyread.com, in case you’re in stumble mode, just looking for something to read but not sure what. It also contains a Google news/blog search so that you can find any URL you might need and load it in Tidyread.com directly. There is also a “Settings” page that will allow you to change the look and feel of the pages it shows, including various formats such as ‘Newspaper’, ‘Novel’, ‘eBook’ and others.
(I tried it out on a YouTube video link too, but it didn’t do anything with the video itself, just gave me the text and links on the page. Can’t have everything, I guess.)
Now, all of that describes the basic and totally free service Tidyread.com offers from it’s main page without registration of any kind. However, if you choose to register (which is free!) you can reap other benefits as well!
By registering an account, you can:
• Create your own reading list that is portable
• Save pages to read later with TidyRead bookmarklet
• Customize the look and feel for different devices
• Reorder headlines to reduce scrolling when read
• Get social reading recommendations
• Network with friends with similar reading taste (in development)
• And more …
Conclusion: Tidyread.com is a boon to all of us who don’t have access to modern mobile technology, but still want to get in on mobile browsing action. I will be using it at least until I get an Android, and perhaps even after that.
Tested on: Chrome 5.0+ on Windows 7 Home Premium 32-bit, and also on the LG 900g mobile phone running [Thanks go to Reader Panzer telling us about this great resource!]Opera lite and the built in Java based LG browser.
[Thanks go to Reader Panzer telling us about this great resource!]
Visit Tidyread.com today!
