Skweezer
In my never ending quest to make the best use of my Internet-enabled Pocket PC, I stumbled across a great web service called Skweezer. Skweezer strips out the text from web sites and makes web pages ordinarily unreadable on a small screen, suddenly readable.
I first heard about Skweezer via a notice from my online news aggregator, Bloglines. For a while, Bloglines has supported mobile devices with a mobile device-optimized portal to Bloglines. Some feeds don’t post all of their content on the feed so you are forced to click on the source link. In many cases, this would bring you to a regular web page that isn’t optimized for mobile devices.
My Pocket PC’s Pocket Internet Explorer has a feature which helps alleviate the problem. I can switch between “Default” and “Single Column” processing modes which help shrink a page or I could select “Desktop” to get the real web page (and deal with lots of side and down-scrolling). However, styles can still make things look screwy.
Skweezer does a much better job. It essentially removes any styling and presents an extremely simple view of your page.
I found that I could use Skweezer for arbitrary links, too. If you go to the main page and enter “http://primordia.com/blog” to the input box, you are redirected to a skweezed version of Primordial Ooze:
http://skweezer.net/skweeze.aspx?q=http%3A%2F%2Fprimordia.com%2Fblog&i=1–
If you click on the above link, you’ll notice that every link is in turn skweezed, so you can continue to have a mobile-optimized browsing experience.
I have since bookmarked skweezed-versions of some of my favorite sites, sites that perhaps don’t have a feed and I need to view regularly.