After a long day spent wrestling with Perl modules and Apache RewriteRules, I have got my HTML stripping utility online. It’s a brutal but effective CGI that gets rid of images, scripts, colour, most text formatting, and leaves just the text content. The possible advantages:

  • View pages quicker on a slow connection
  • Eliminates horizontal scrolling on small-screen devices
  • Firewall evasion
  • No embarrassing pictures loaded at work as your boss comes in...

I wrote it so that I can view internet content on my handheld computer. If it’s useful to you, feel free to try it out. Just use this pattern:

http://po-ru.com/strip/ www.anothersite.com/page.html

For example, here is Slashdot in the original and stripped-down form. Note: I had to remove these links after they generated 500MB of traffic due to a spidering bot.

If anything weird happens, please let me know! If I find that it is using too much bandwidth, I’ll disable the feature, so use it wisely...

Oh, and Jo says that my guitar is extremely ugly. Tade kuu mushi mo sukizuki.