Readability translator?

erazlogo
Is there a chance someone may create a translator for Readability (a site that strips any extraneous images/ads from an article and displays it in a format convenient for reading)? The site has a consistent way of displaying the metadata. With a translator for it, any web article's metadata will be downloadable into Zotero via a Readability plugin.

https://www.readability.com/
  • adamsmith
    that's a great idea...
  • ajlyon
    Ask (for easy and good things) and ye shall receive.

    Please go to http://github.com/ajlyon/zotero-bits/raw/master/Readability.js and save the file to the translators directory of your Zotero data directory (http://www.zotero.org/support/zotero_data).

    Restart Firefox and enjoy.
  • erazlogo
    @ajlyon: Many thanks!
  • ajlyon
    I had forgotten to have it save snapshots. The version on Github now grabs them as well.

    Please use this for a bit and report back on how it works soon. If all is well, I'll commit it to the repository.
  • adamsmith
    thanks - I'll do some testing later today - much appreciated.
  • ajlyon
    Updated on Github again-- please update your local installation.
  • erazlogo
    @ajlyon: if you're still editing, can you test for author=null? z gives me an error when article has no author.
  • ajlyon
    Fixed on Github, I think. Let me know if you run into something that Readability renders with multiple authors-- I haven't accounted for that yet, since I don't quite know how Readability will present it.
  • adamsmith
    works great for me.
    This has two authors on Readability
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/26/world/americas/26mexico.html?ref=americas
    and it doesn't quite work. Obviously it doesn't really matter here since I'm going to use the NYT translator anyway, but all other pages I looked at didn't give me any author at all.
  • ajlyon
    Fixed on Github.

    I think we can put this in the repository now. Let me know if you run into any additional metadata that Readability picks up, but doesn't get put in the Zotero item.
  • ajlyon
    Now in SVN, r8755.
  • erazlogo
    @ajlyon Any chance you can also test for date=null? Readability doesn't always extract the date, and currently Z gives an error if there is no date.
  • erazlogo
    edited April 2, 2011
    Also, if the author could be automatically converted from all caps to title case, it would be great. Sorry for so many requests--many thanks!
  • ajlyon
    Try this one:

    Please go to http://github.com/ajlyon/zotero-bits/raw/master/Readability.js and save the file to the translators directory of your Zotero data directory (http://www.zotero.org/support/zotero_data).

    It should fix the all-caps issue.
  • erazlogo
    It works beautifully--thanks!
  • beogl
    Hi ajlyon, I just stumbled upon your Readability translator. Very nice!

    However for my purpose it is much better to save the text from the page as "abstractNote" since that is both easier to read and searchable (I use Google for that).

    I made a slight change to your translator to achive that. Maybe you want to adopt it?
  • adamsmith
    glad it's working for you, but we won't accept that change to the repository. I'm actually not sure if this is a good idea since the text of readability pages can get _very_ long (they display articles in single page view) and I'm not sure at what length for an abstract sync breaks.
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