The Website Blinder

Surely you’ve seen HeckYesMarkdown before. It’s a project from Brett Terpstra that accepts a URL and chokes out a Markdown translation of the page content. I’ve used it on occasion for easily extracting links on a page.

Yesterday I followed a CNN link on Twitter that immediately started playing a video. I was so annoyed that I spent the 5 seconds it took to create a new Alfred workflow. Here’s the page after processing. Nothing but text in my face, the way I like it.

Here’s the ridiculously simple Alfred workflow.

This extension sends a URL to HeckYesMarkdown for viewing. I bring up Alfred, type mark, space, and then paste in the URL. There’s an entire API to HeckYesMarkdown but this works exactly as I need it to.

Sure, I could use the bookmarklet. But why reward them with two clicks.