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Readability-Score.com Gets Some Love

Way, way back in 2004, I wrote a piece of code to analyze the readability of text using the various algorithms that had been developed for the task. It grew in usage, and became an Open Source project and got its own website over the next few years. And then, it sat around, being useful but quiet.

Every so often I would take a look at the stats, modify a little piece of code, or actually use the tool myself. But more often than not, it didn't really venture into my thoughts, except briefly when some kind soul made a donation because the site was useful to them.

But that's no way to run a website, even if it is a small, single-purpose site. So, it's had some attention. Dinner and a movie, a quick fumble behind the bike sheds - usual sort of thing.

What's New?

One of the first changes that you might spot on the new site is addition of a great big "Premium" tab. Premium supporters pay a small amount every year (as much as they like) to help pay for the site. (They also get access to the new bulk processing feature - more info below.)

Next, Readability-Score.com now supports URLs. Instead of copying and pasting text from another site, you can just drop in the URL, and it will go off, fetch the page, process the text and give you a score for the readability of the page. You can specify a single portion of the page, if you want and if you're familiar with IDs in HTML, and it will just score that part of the page - good for helping prevent navigation and footer elements from skewing your text scores.

The site is also now served over HTTPS. Because why not.

There's now a quick and convenient bookmarklet, for sending the URL of the page you're browsing to Readability-Score.com.

Next, there is now a handy bulk processing feature, for people with lots of text or URLs to score. It takes a CSV, processes the text or URLs within it, and emails the results back to you. Bulk processing is only available to premium supporters at the moment.

It's had a small set of changes made to the codebase, thanks in part to fellow text statistics enthusiasts on GitHub. So it's now a little faster and a tiny bit more accurate. Though it still can't tell how many syllables there are in moped, and doesn't handle numbers particularly well.

Finally, everyone who has donated to Readability-Score in the last couple of years has been made a premium supporter and should have received an email with their login details; if you donated and haven't received your login, please let me know.