Plaintext MeFi?

January 19, 2003 8:34 AM

Is the plain-text version of Metafilter available through a URL hack or a GET request? i.e. can I get the plain-text version without changing my profile? That would be useful for Palm and other small-device versions, esp. for comment pages...
posted by costas to Feature Requests at 8:34 AM (9 comments total)

LoFi (temporary)
posted by riffola at 8:42 AM on January 19, 2003

Try this: http://www.metafilter.com/lofi.mefi.

On preview: drat! Riff beat me to it!
posted by The Michael The at 8:51 AM on January 19, 2003

Well, Matt has said in the past (I was just reading the MeTa thread but cann't find it in my history...) that LoFi is temporary and may go away (and LoFi is different than the Plain Text "theme" available through Customize).

Secondly, plain text works for comment pages too, while LoFi doesn't (as far as I can tell). To me, Plain Text is ideal for low-end devices such as Palms and 2.5G phones (yep, I got a new toy I wanna read MeFi on!), but I don't want to lose Ole Blue on my PC...
posted by costas at 10:17 AM on January 19, 2003

i doubt you can do it by adding a get param to the url because it's stored in cookies (cookie and get/post values are generally available via different interfaces on the server side).

i don't know what your client software is, but maybe you could produce a similar end-result by providing a local style sheet (you could even grab the plain text one)?

ps lofi has been there for years - while it's possible it will go away, it does server a useful function (providing access to deleted threads to see what the justification was for killing them).
posted by andrew cooke at 11:35 AM on January 19, 2003

(incidentally, times on lofi don't change with user preferences, so you see a different grouping of threads by date if you have a time-zone set that's different from the default).
posted by andrew cooke at 11:38 AM on January 19, 2003

costas, just set your theme cookie for each browser separately. If you login on a PC and choose the standard theme, you'll keep it as long as you are logged in. If login to mefi on a palm and choose the plain text version, you'll see that as long as you stay logged in on that device.

The only time your theme will change on your PC is when you login again or re-save your preferences page. I did this purposely so people could have the plain text setting on their work machines while having the default on their home computers.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 12:05 PM on January 19, 2003

what kind of phone do you have? does it handle "@media handheld", do any handhelds actually recognize that or is it just w3c pie-in-the-sky wishful thinking?
posted by rhyax at 12:15 PM on January 19, 2003

Matt: the trouble is there are a lot of small-device browsers that don't support cookies. At any rate, I'll try it out and see. I mostly care about the comment pages too, not the index.

Rhyax: I got me a Nokia 6610. It should do plain simplifed HTML, although I don't want to shell out for the extra option (GPRS) without cheking what content I can get on it (like MeFi!).
posted by costas at 2:23 PM on January 19, 2003

As someone who regulary uses their phone and or PDA to check e-mail I would love to be able to mead MEFI on it. But as they dont supposrt cookies I normally dont bother. This would be a great feature.

P.S. GPRS is great, loads faster.
posted by john_son at 6:55 AM on January 22, 2003