Leveraging Holistic Synergies: Ben Lopatin

Making Medium posts readable

February 26, 2019

The publishing platform Medium is, for the time being, still quite popular. However the formatting of Medium hosted pages is terrible and unreadable.

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

Large, pretty stock images that add little to no value to the post itself.
A giant sticky header
A giant sticky footer
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.

Another fine post by Ben Lopatin.