IYHY.com: Website De-Gunkifier for Mobiles

Got a great tip today from Matt Henderson about the conversion tool IYHY.com that I just had to share here. The site, by B. Adam Howell is pretty simple — it strips extraneous images and gunk from websites so they work better in small-screen and low-bandwidth situations (like on a mobile device).

The tool can also create a bookmarked list of your favorite converted sites, if you choose to create a username and password, though this is an added bonus. Here's Howell's description of the tool:

IYHY is an attempt to fix the mobile web today instead of one or five years from now. If you sign-up IYHY will keep a running, editable list of your “mobile bookmarks”. If you don't sign-up, that's cool too, IYHY will just strip all the crap from a web page and give you the good stuff when you're on the go -- the content.

So, if you use a Treo, or another wireless mobile device with minimal bandwidth, or you just want the content, check out IYHY.com or the founder's blog.

Update 2005-08-22

Dennis Hettema wote in recently to tell me about PHONifier — a tool similar to IYHY.com, but is open source. The advantage being, you could install this tool on your own server and never worry if IYHY.com or other services will be around in the future to serve you.

PHONifier was initially developed to optimize webpages automatically. You set PHONifier.com to be your mobile homepage and then surf the web through the PHONifier proxy. Alternatively, you could install the PHONifier script on your server to have it automatically update your webpages when a mobile device tries to access them. Other uses we're working on are: as an RSS/Atom reader (Already implemented! Give it a try with your favorite RSS feed) and as a proofing/testing tool.

Looks useful, especially for DIY folks that have access to servers and don't mind doing a little installation. Dennis, thanks for the tip! :-)

Technorati Tags: mobiles, palm

Comments

[Lo Szabo]

I love it!!! Thank you...

;-) Lo

[B. Adam]

Hi, thanks for linking to IYHY!

Glad you like the service, I'm slowly but surely trying to make it better everyday.

Thanks again.

[Mike Rohde]

B. Adam, glad to feature your neato tool! I have beeen using it with my Zire 72 and WiFi card with great success. :-)

[Lo Szabo]

Hello B. Adam, hello Mike!

Actually IYHY.com is also perfect for the BlackBerry and for Palm with iSilo/X. It saved me a lot of download time last week in the country, where I have very slow and hyper-expensive GPRS connections only.

BTW, couldn't test IYHY.com on the Nintendo DS yet! ;-)