Our Block Ads! site is a simple way for people to check whether their browser is blocking advertising or not, and to get a recommendation for an ad blocker if it isn’t. It’s also intended to be a website you can send to friends and family so they can quickly test their own browsers and install an appropriate ad blocker.
Push to Kindle is one of our most popular applications here on FiveFilters.org. It has sent over 5 million web articles to Kindle devices and has over 70,000 active users. Here’s a quick update for our users.
Our Block Ads! site reached the front page of Hacker News on Friday. It sparked a big discussion—over 120 comments! Thanks everyone who upvoted and gave us feedback about the tool. We’ve started work on improving it and will post about the changes soon.
I want to address some of the feedback we’ve received, as much of it comes up whenever ad blocking is discussed.
If you use an ad blocker, you’ve probably come across sites which ask you to switch it off. Doing so exposes you to not only ads and spying, but often malware too—as many Forbes readers discovered when they did just that at the behest of the site.
Many ad-dependent sites are now so desperate for ad money that they’ll give you a stern telling off if they find you’re using an ad blocker, or prevent you from seeing their content until you turn it off
The new version of our Full-Text RSS application is now available. This is mostly a maintenance release. Here’s what’s new.
The new version of our Feed Creator application is now available. Feed Creator started life as a tool letting you create feeds for sites which don’t offer their own.
The new version of our Full-Text RSS application is now available. Full-Text RSS is our article extraction and partial-to-full-text feed conversion tool. You can try it out now, or read on to find out what’s new. This is mostly a maintenance release, with a few new features.
Yesterday we started appending a section to the end of all Guardian articles processed by Push to Kindle–our service which converts and sends web articles to Kindle devices. The new section is there to highlight criticism and recent revelations about the Guardian that our users might not have come across. It includes links to articles from Medialens, Nafeez Ahmed, and Jonathan Cook.
We’re working on a new tool called Simple Print. It converts web articles into printable PDFs. It’s an extension of our PDF Newspaper application and will most likely be part of the next PDF Newspaper release.
As many of our users know, Full-Text RSS, our article extraction tool, relies on a number of site-specific extraction rules which we maintain in our GitHub repository.
These extraction rules were initially imported from Instapaper (before it was sold, when they were still publicly available). And since then we’ve done our best to update them and have received many contributions from our users (thank you!).