Text Mirror, Return Text-Only Contents Of Any Website

If you are browsing the Internet at work, chance is that you cannot visit some websites. The IT department may have blocked access to sites that may distract you from work related tasks. This may be Facebook and Twitter, web proxy sites to prevent you from circumventing the block, entertainment sites like YouTube and adult orientated sites. Sometimes though perfectly harmless sites are caught in the crossfire. Ghacks may be such a candidate due to the "hacks" in the name.

Sometimes you only need to access the contents of a site, but do not need to interact with it in other forms. This can be the case if you are researching a problem on the Internet, and the site that appears to have the solution posted is blocked on your computer.

You could now try the cached version if the search engine offers that to you, or hunt down for a working proxy to access the website.

Or, you could try the Text Mirror service which basically returns all textual contents of a web page to you.

All you need to do for that is to enter the website address into the page mirror form, check the I Accept TOS box and click Create.

It does not take long before a stripped down version of the page is presented to you on the Text Mirror website. Most formatting and style options are removed, which means that you cannot click on links (you actually do not see them at all) and that you do not see images or other media either.

You can change the font size and color scheme at the top which are remembered in future page look-ups. The biggest weakness of the service is that it does not display links at all, which can be problematic if the article that you have retrieved is divided onto multiple pages, or if you'd like to access a source cited in the article.

Text Mirror is a nice service to retrieve contents from single-article pages only. It is more likely that you can use the service under the radar for a longer time, as you do not retrieve that many files from the original site as you would with a proxy or direct access. That said, it is still likely that the service will get blocked in IT departments eventually. (via)

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