Maximising Medium

I don’t know about you, but I find the reader-unfriendly letterbox design of Medium pretty irritating. [eg]

A platform literally built for people to read things, filling about a quarter of the visible browser height with pointless elements, begging you to sign up or remind you what you’re trying read. Sigh.

So, I’ve knocked up a little ‘bookmarklet’ script to get rid of the annoying bits:

You should be able to click and drag this link >>> MAXMEDIUM <<< to your Chrome browser Toolbar to create a simple button to click, when things get on your way on Medium articles.

If that doesn’t work, you can create a new bookmark and paste this code in to the ‘url/link’ entry:

javascript: (function() {
    function R(w) {
        try {
            var d = w.document;
           console.log(d.getElementsByClassName('metabar'));
            if(d.getElementsByClassName('overlay')[0]){
 d.getElementsByClassName('overlay')[0].parentNode.removeChild(d.getElementsByClassName('overlay')[0]);
            }
            if(d.getElementsByClassName('metabar')[0]){
 d.getElementsByClassName('metabar')[0].parentNode.removeChild(d.getElementsByClassName('metabar')[0]);
            }
            if(d.getElementsByClassName('branch-journeys-top')[0]){
 d.getElementsByClassName('branch-journeys-top')[0].parentNode.removeChild(d.getElementsByClassName('branch-journeys-top')[0]);
            }
            if(d.getElementsByClassName('js-stickyFooter')[0]){
 d.getElementsByClassName('js-stickyFooter')[0].parentNode.removeChild(d.getElementsByClassName('js-stickyFooter')[0]);
            }
        } catch (E) {
           console.warn(E);
        }
    }
    R(self);
})()

I’ve also created one to kill autoplaying videos from news sites like The Independent, which then follow you down the page as you’re trying to READ the NEWS, even though you stopped it or never wanted to watch it. Double-deep-sigh.

What a waste of bandwidth. And also completely destroying any sense of honesty from analytics on video views. “Hey, video views are up!” “That’s great! Well done video producers! Call the ad men!”
Web developers: “…….”