I like this because I can just plug in the URL of any old article I might want to read and see what I'm getting myself into, e.g. http://klopets.com/readtime/?url=http://www.newyorker.com/ma.... Now that I know it's a 15 minute read, I'll probably save it for later.
This would be great as a browser plugin.
You are right, and thanks for pointing that out. I can generally tell how long it will take to read an article with a little scroll and a glance at the scroll bar. If the scroll bar is small, reading is going to take a while and vice versa.
I have a lot of quality content marked for later and not knowing how long it is (especially when e.g. commuting to work when I have 10 minutes only) is rather annoying. And managing the list isn't something I fancy doing myself (we have computers for that!).
Drop me an email (in my profile) if you want to talk a bit more about this problem.
Just asking because there's no explanation, and it would be probably better to hack something in JS than to depend on this probably-soon-to-vanish-api. There's already https://eager.io/app/reading-time, for example, which anyone can install in 2 minutes, and is based on a simple algorithm[1], it seems.
[1]: https://github.com/TeffenEllis/reading-time/blob/master/app....
(Source for 200 words per minute: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Words_per_minute#Reading_and_c... )
https://github.com/grangier/python-goose
https://pypi.python.org/pypi/textstat/
+ using word counts that adjust for reading ease
But if you wrote this to warn me, then thanks!
I did.
You're not the first person to make that kind of mistake, and I assumed it was an obvious enough "attack" that trying to communicate it privately wasn't required.
I do think I should adjust the words per minute values...
[1] https://github.com/getpelican/pelican-plugins/tree/master/po... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flesch%E2%80%93Kincaid_readabil...
I plugged one of my own posts in and it read 3 minutes and 166 seconds (5 minutes and 46 seconds).
NOTE: If you are using a library for easily doing HTTP requests, than you can probably use a library for estimating time to read.