TextMadeWeb: A website to browse the web while using a terrible internet connection
Tags: internet, cuba
Published: 2020-03-17 16:37:32

---
title: TextMadeWeb: A website to browse the web while using a terrible internet connection
published: true
description: A small story of how I made my internet faster by getting rid of all the noise 
tags: internet, Cuba
---
## A small introduction

You are probably tired of me saying how bad the internet connection is overall in Cuba, so I'll skip a bit that part today :D
A few years ago I was working with a terrible internet connection. I could not have better and loading pages on StackOverflow took minutes. Can you imagine? I was so frustrated and accomplishing so little at the time that I decided to fix the problem the way I know how to: programming a solution.

## Here goes the testing

When I was in college I used to use **iptables** to control my internet traffic. That way I could decide what I wanted to consume and reduce my internet consumption to save the scarce amount of megabytes (100) I was getting every month. Yes, I'm NOT talking about speed. That's the actual amount of megabytes I could use every month.
So my first idea was to reuse my old **iptables** script with lots and lots of blocked addresses. But this eventually became problematic. I needed to again start to update my lists with new addresses and deprecate some that didn't even exist anymore. It was also not portable, so I could not give it to my friends using Windows. I scratched that one really fast from the list.
My second thought was to make a proxy to do the whole thing for me. I could distribute it or share it with my friends without problems but again updating it would be problematic so I again decided not to go that way.
At the time, a lot of my friends were also using these web proxies to bypass blocked sites so I had the idea of making something like that but to strip the webs of everything but text (and some styling because reading code in plaintext is a natural cause for headaches).

## The product

I'm a lazy person :-) I know I should not be proud of it, but somehow I am. Being lazy makes you work extra to find a way to do things with less effort. In my case, I just realized that If I used a library to turn HTML into Markdown and then back to HTML, the result was tremendously clean. I just needed to then remove the images and trick the links so they will open inside the same site. I added a bit of compression and that's it.

Here is the result:
![Front Page](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/i/a490v166aeo96wngwwjk.png)

No styles, no images, no Javascript. Just plain text. You can find it hosted on https://txtmdweb.herokuapp.com/

You introduce the address that you want to "textify" and hit the "Text it!" button. The result will be something like this:

![Texted page](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/i/ad1dhj1m5skxqsku1b7d.png)

You can also do Google searches with it, but it is not particularly good at it :')

I used [Django](https://www.djangoproject.com/) (1.11 at the time) to write the project and the sources can be found [here](https://github.com/jadolg/TextMadeWeb)

## Disadvantages

- I only implemented **getting** sites. No further interactions are permitted, so no login or cookies or anything but clear text which is publically available.
- No Javascript. Sadly, a lot of websites today are mostly Javascript. If the website you are trying to convert to text is using Javascript to load its content, this is not going to work.

## Conclusion

I hope you liked the story and if you are in need of using such a tool (I really hope you are not), well now you know it exists. 
Want to make it better? PRs are open ;-) or just go open an issue.
And that's all. If you liked the project, go hit that star button on GitHub which makes open-source developers like me very happy.