Make Your Blog More Reader-Friendly Without Changing the Layout

It is the readability of blog that brings regular readers. Of course, every one knows. But to have a blog that makes money,  ads has to be a major part which reduces the clutter-free reading experience. I, also, have been looking for an alternate to increase the readability of my blog without changing the theme or layout until I have found the codes on labnol. But some of my friends finds it hard to implement as they don’t have much knowledge in the html part.  So here I am trying to simplify the code in another way . Hope it helps.

A single click on a button or link takes you to a reader-friendly version, without any alterations in the theme. Here’s the method, so you have a try on your blog.

1. Login to WordPress admin panel.

2. Under ‘Pages‘ menu on the left hand side, click ‘Add New‘.

3. A new page will open. Give the page a title like ‘Reader Friendly’.

Set the permalink to http://www.yourblogname.com/read/

Fill your blog name in the url and leave the body of the page blank. Then save the page.

4.  Login to FTP. Download .htaccess file and add the code at top.

RewriteRule ^read/([0-9]+)/?$ /read/?u=$1 [QSA,L]

5.  Click here to download ‘page-read.php.txt‘ file to your system, rename it as ‘page-read.php‘

and then upload the file to Word Press theme folder.

6. Now we have to add a link or a button to your blog. For that, open ‘single.php‘. Then add the following code to the button.

Code for text link:

<a href="/read/<?php the_ID(); ?>/" target="_blank">Reader Friendly Version</a>

Code for an image:

<a href="/read/<?php the_ID(); ?>/" target="_blank"><img src="image"/></a>

If  you want a title to appear when you place the cursor on top of image, add title tag in between a href.
eg:  <a title=”Reader Friendly Version” href=”/read/<?php the_ID();

If you want to open the Reader-friendly version in same page itself, instead of a pop-up, remove the code – target=”_blank”.

Hope the tutorial helps you to make your own reader-friendly page.