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Use Readability to Make Sites Zotero-Friendly

May 5, 2011, 8:00 am

By Amy Cavender

Two great toolsEvery now and again, you discover something really useful, quite by accident. That happened to me recently. I was browsing the web, and found something I needed to print out, but the site in question wasn’t particularly printer-friendly.

That didn’t pose any particular problem; getting rid of on-screen clutter, whether for reading or printing purposes, is why I installed Readability, after all.

It was what happened after I loaded the site in Readability that was interesting. The site wasn’t Zotero-compatible before. After I loaded it in Readability, it was.

For example, here’s what ProtoScholar’s post on the importance of backups looks like when first loaded:

Without Readability

Note the Readability icons, and the lack of a Zotero icon.

Here’s what the post looks like after loading it in Readability:

With Readability

A Zotero icon has magically appeared. Clicking on it results in the expected behavior: the page is added to the Zotero library, and Zotero grabs the screenshot along with the publication information, as seen below.

In Zotero

Admittedly, this discovery is hardly earth-shattering. But it’s saved me some time, and I get nice, clean screenshots in my Zotero library.

What about you? Have you accidentally stumbled upon small, but nevertheless useful, tips? Please share them in the comments!

[All post images are Creative Commons licensed Flickr photos by cavenderamy]

 
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  • ajlyon

    Glad you liked it! This is a new translator that was added barely a month ago, and it lets Zotero take advantage of Readability’s algorithms for figuring out the page title, date, main content, etc. Still not as good as a dedicated translator for a site, but certainly better than nothing. Post to the forum thread on it (http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/17112/) if you run into any issues with it.

  • acavender

    Many thanks for putting this translator together! I’ve found it really helpful.

  • march_hair

    I discovered after downloading Evernote that Thunderbird started displaying a pop-up message whenever I received a new email. This is great because I can see if it’s something I can ignore immediately without having to actually go to my email every time my email alert goes off.

  • http://amandafrench.net Amanda French

    Hey, that’s awesome. I didn’t know that. Rainangel, you can set Thunderbird to notify you when you have a new e-mail in the Thunderbird preferences. Though if you’ve found something that works for you, that’s cool.

  • march_hair

    I know that it’s possible to set a sound or animate the Thunderbird icon, both of which I already have activated, but that doesn’t tell you who the email is coming from or which account has just received an email (if you have multiple accounts). The popup messages I now get tell me that.

    Amanda, is there a way to activate this feature from within Thunderbird?
    I just looked but didn’t see anything obvious.

  • http://amandafrench.net Amanda French

    Nah, rainangel, it was just the sound and popups I was thinking of. Good to know that Evernote can do that (though I never ever want to be notified when I have new e-mail).

  • http://twitter.com/jenfoolery Jenny Reiswig

    That is a very cool tip – and I like that it grabs the real URL, not the Readability-ized one. Coolness!

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