I read a lot of articles online, and sometimes the ads and navigation links make it difficult to concentrate on the text of article, much less on the ideas that the text is trying to communicate. The folks at arc90 have come to the rescue with Readability, a JavaScript bookmarklet that reformats the current web page as a clean page of text:

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Readability works great in Safari, but I do most of my web reading in NetNewsWire, the RSS reader by Brent Simmons of Newsgator. And NetNewsWire does not have a bookmarks bar where I could put the Readability bookmarklet.

Fortunately, NetNewsWire does have a Scriptmenu, and support for the do JavaScript AppleScript command. That makes it possible to add Readability support to NetNewsWire by following these steps:

1. Run Script Editor and create an AppleScript like the following:

   set theJS to "bookmarklet link"
   set jsScheme to "javascript:"
   if (offset of jsScheme in theJS) is 1 then
   	set theJS to (characters from (1 + (length of jsScheme)) to -1 of theJS) as string
   end if
   tell application "NetNewsWire"
   	do JavaScript theJS
   end tell
   

2. Go to the Readability web page to create a bookmarklet with your preferred settings
3. Right-click (or Control-click) the bookmark and choose Copy Link
4. Back in Script Editor, paste the link you just copied in place of the text bookmarklet link; it will start with "javascript:" and will be quite long
5. Save your script (e.g. to the Desktop)
6. Choose Open Scripts Folder from the Scriptmenu in NetNewsWire
7. Copy your saved script to the NetNewsWire Scripts folder

Once you’ve followed these steps your script will be listed in NetNewsWire’s Scriptmenu, and you can choose it to invoke Readability for the currently displayed web page.