Using Readability with NetNewsWire

Most of my heavy reading takes place in NetNewsWire, so I’ve coupled up Arc90′s Readability bookmarklet with the application.

It’s for use when you have to open up an item in the built-in browser. For full-text feeds, I recommend Cameron Hunt’s Bullit.

Instructions for using Readability with NetNewsWire:

  1. Go to the Readability website.
  2. Choose your settings.
  3. Right-click on the ‘Readability’ button. (Picture)
  4. Choose “Copy link”.
  5. Open TextEdit (or a similar application) and paste the link.
  6. Save the file, with the ending .js (Picture)
  7. Open NetNewsWire.
  8. Open the scripts folder from the scripts menu. (Picture)
  9. Copy in the file you just created.

Note: You should make sure JavaScript is enabled in NetNewsWire’s preferences for browsing web pages. Thanks Scott!. (Picture)

Also, when you save the JavaScript, make sure TextEdit is set to plain text mode. Otherwise you won’t be able to save it as a .js file.

That’s it. You can now access the Readability script from the scripts menu, or (as I prefer) give it a keyboard shortcut through the Keyboard & Mouse preference pane.

If you have any questions please leave a comment, but please note I can’t give any support for Readability or NetNewsWire (you should go pester them).

[Update: Thanks go to @briandoll on Twitter, for pointing out a redundant step.]


This originally received a lot of comments, and I won’t reproduce them here (though I’m glad so many people found this useful!).


Update 10.08am, December 27th, 2009

This method should work for JavaScript bookmarklets in general. Chris Pultz has a tutorial on how to use Diigo with NetNewsWire, for example.

About Rob Wells

Rob is a freelance journalist and a recent graduate of the Lincoln School of Journalism (2007–2010).
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