Making Medium posts readable

The Medium post, regardless of its content, is defined by several visual characteristics:

1. Large, pretty stock images that add little to no value to the post itself.
2. A giant sticky header
3. A giant sticky footer
4. Some garish popup suggesting you join

Its awful. I wouldn't mind if it weren't so popular (again, at least for the time being).

So my immediate solution is a bookmarklet that executes some JavaScript which cleans up the page.

Here it is in slightly pretty-printed format.

javascript: (function() {
    document.querySelectorAll('[data-action="overlay-close"]').forEach(function(v, k, l) {
        v.click()
    });
    ["metabar", "postMeterBar", "elevateSidebar", "butterBar", "js-stickyFooter", "js-postLeftSidebar"].forEach(function(v, k, o) {
        try {
            document.getElementsByClassName(v)[0].remove()
        } catch (e) {
            console.log(e)
        }
    });
})();

Why not make this a browser extension? I might. But for now having access to a button to kill every terrible thing suffices. Once having to remember the bookmark button starts annoying me enough I'll create an extension in anger.

Originally published 2019-02-26