Online reading, offline
I can always tell which articles I want to read, but I’m not very good at actually reading them. I choose my RSS feeds carefully, and keep my NetNewsWire subscription list trim. I’m a ninja master at blazing through the unread bits, opening each post of note in its own tab in Safari. That’s where I get stuck.
Once all the new stuff has been turned into slightly older stuff in front of my face, I can’t summon the attention to read through it all. The solution I keep coming back to is kinda retarded: I print everything out and read it on the couch.
This does not mean, however, that I just press command-P and settle with a copy of the browser window on paper. The ads distract, the interface junk distracts, the typeface distracts. After some trial and error, I have found a neutral format.
Copy the text of the article or post, and the text only. It’s hard to drag a selection over a lot of text, but you can click at the beginning, hold Shift, and click at the end to select everything, then copy.
Open a blank document in TextMate. In Preferences, I’ve chosen 12 pt. Panic Sans at the default font. Yes, monospaced.
Paste.
Print, selecting 4 Pages per Sheet in “Layout”.
I get a neutral, compressed, not-too-wasteful mini-newspaper to read throughout the day. Seems like a no-brainer, right?
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