In the world of web scraping, text mining and article reading utilities (readability bookmarklet) there is an ever growing demand for utilities that are capable of distinguishing parts of a HTML document which represent an article apart from other common website building blocks like menus, headers, footers, ads etc.

In the following chapters I’ll try to review some article text extraction methods that are applicable to today’s websites. They mostly leverage on machine learning, statistics and a wide rage of heuristics.

In grad school, I once saw a prof I was working with grab a text file and in seconds manipulate it into little pieces so deftly it blew my mind. I immediately decided it was time for me to learn awk, which he had so clearly mastered.

ASCIImeo (asciimeo.com) is a project by Peter Nitsch that renders Vimeo videos in three different textmodes.

Here are some of Peter’s favorite videos in ASCII:
Metamorphosis by Glenn Marshall
MOTOR / AMBIENT REEL by KU-SCHNEIDER
Magnetic Ink by flight404
Still Run by DANTE NOU
Look At Me by Patrick Lawler

Read more incl technical info on Peter’s blog. Video below is of Glenn Marshall’s generative app also available for the iPhone.

(via today and tomorrow incl images = ASCIImeo version of Scintillation)

ASCII Animation (Scripts)WriteRoom Now with WebApp Sync [iPhone, WebApp]Chrome Experiments [News]12seconds [WebApp]A Tool to Deceive and Slaughter [Objects]AsciiMe [iPhone]

I decided to take on the task of making a general-purpose text generator, that will imitate the style and content of any arbitrary document.

WriteRoom is a full screen, distraction free, writing environment.