Built a little tool for turning a web page into Markdown...

Built a little tool for turning a web page into Markdown and easily copying it to my clipboard - it's a very thin wrapper around the Jina Reader API https://tools.simonwillison.net/jina-reader

Details on how I built it (by prompting Claude) here: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Oct/14/my-jina-reader-tool/

Screenshot of Jina Reader tool - a URL has been pasted in and the submit button clicked, below is a textarea full of markdown, a copy to clipboard button and the markdown rendered as HTML

Like 14 October at 17:00 | Open on fedi.simonwillison.net

9 comments

Simon Willison

I'm increasingly finding that "Copy to clipboard" is an essential feature in things that I build, mainly because select all then copy and paste on mobile phones is still pretty inconvenient

14 October at 17:03 | Open on fedi.simonwillison.net

Scanner

@simon I have a maxim that “when a human is copying and pasting data between two applications something is wrong”. Copy to clipboard (and indeed being able to copy text and data out of apps that are not web pages is an essential capability.)

14 October at 17:28 | Open on apricot.social

James Scholes

@simon Thank you.

14 October at 17:36 | Open on dragonscave.space

Simon Willison

Made some improvements https://gist.github.com/simonw/e56d55e6a87a547faac7070eb912b32d

</script>
</body> </html>
Modify this:
• the textarea and html preview should not be shown until the API call finishes
• the input should be in a form with a submit event to hitting enter activates it
• a "Loading..." indicator should show while the APl is running
• the HTML preview should be shown in an iframe with a sandbox attribute
• that iframe should start with a snippet of
CSS to set max width on images to 100%
I understand. I'll modify the HTML and JavaScript to implement these changes. Here's the updated version:
• Modified Jina Reader Webpage

14 October at 18:09 | Open on fedi.simonwillison.net

Jeff Triplett

@simon neat, TIL https://r.jina.ai/https://simonwillison.net/2024/Oct/14/my-jina-reader-tool/

14 October at 18:55 | Open on mastodon.social

Jeff Triplett

@simon I have leaned on "copy to clipboard" apps/pages in everything from DjangoCon US to my dozen or so Django side projects.

I often need markdown from a data source that I want to paste into a newsletter, YouTube description, or someplace else.

I can normally write these in single-digit minutes vs. spending 15 to 30 minutes on a less flexible API call.

14 October at 18:58 | Open on mastodon.social

Evan B🥥ehs

@simon Hi Simon, I don't want AI using my site, and I block the user agents of many AI crawlers. Unfortunately, Jina

1. Does not acknowledge robots.txt
2. Uses a user-agent header designed to obscure its identity
3. Uses puppeteer with custom plugins to obscure itself.

This ain't it.

14 October at 18:30 | Open on social.coop

MikeWas

@simon This is very cool.

14 October at 21:29 | Open on esq.social

Joshua Oliphant

@simon @simon That is really nifty. It inspired me to use the Jina API in an Apple Shortcut so that I can just hit the share button from my browser, select the shortcut , which constructs the Jina URL, makes the request, and then puts the result in my clipboard. All in one go. https://jina.ai/reader/

15 October at 3:32 | Open on techhub.social