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Refactoring eink.link

e-reader icon

eink.link

Links to websites that work well on basic web browsers including those that come with e-readers.


I took the time to spend some time on my new side project, eink.link this morning. Since launching the site last Sunday afternoon, it’s been featured on BoingBoing and added to 512kb.club.

Although, for some reason I can’t quite fathom it still doesn’t load on Kindle browsers, I’ve made some important changes:

  • Removed SimpleCSS in favour of a custom (minified) stylesheet
  • Made dark mode the default
  • Reduced the overall size of the site to 6.6KB
  • Created GitHub issue templates for submitting bugs and links
  • Removed the favicon and added Twitter/OpenGraph cards

I’m enjoying working on this eink.link. It’s a very simple, pragmatic side project!


This post is Day 89 of my #100DaysToOffload challenge. Want to get involved? Find out more at 100daystooffload.com. Icon by Kiranshastry.

Introducing eink.link, my new side project

E-reader showing eink.link in web browser

I’m someone who uses the web browser on my e-reader. I always have done, from the earliest Amazon Kindle I had, through to the bq Cervantes 4 I use these days. To scratch my own itch, I’ve created a new site: eink.link

As you’d expect, web browsers on e-readers aren’t very capable. As websites get ever more bloated and complex, they render ever more poorly on these kinds of devices.

Simple, text-based websites work well, though. So I thought I’d begin to collect these and make them available for anyone to use. I’m not doing anything complicated: just using GitHub Pages to serve up a basic website that’s styled Simple.css.


Right now, I’ve added one or more links in the following categories:

  • Search
  • Ebooks
  • News
  • Weather
  • Social
  • Technical

It’s pretty awesome that I can download EPUB-formatted books directly from my e-reader’s web browser directly to the device!


In case you’re interested, I did do some very basic research with people who self-reported as users of e-readers. The following polls on Mastodon and Twitter together received 101 votes:

Results from Mastodon:

0% Yes, regularly
13% Occasionally
32% I know it's there
55% No / show me the results
Results from Twitter:

6.3% Yes, regularly
9.4% Occasionally
40.6% I know it's there
43.8% No / show me the results

Some may see the above as discouraging, but I disagree: that’s 10-15% of e-reader uses in my sample who are already using an e-reader web browser, and 30-40% who know how to access it.

If this were a ‘product’ rather than a side project, I’d say that there’s a definite niche there to be served. For example, we know that looking at backlit smartphone and tablet screens can cause insomnia. E-ink screens are much better in that regard, plus the simplicity of the websites that work on e-readers are potentially more calming.

For the foreseeable, though, this is just something that’s useful for me and hopefully some other people. The good news is that it works well on every type of web browser. I’m planning to implement a dark mode toggle soon, as well as add a bunch more websites — feel free to suggest some!


This post is Day 88 of my #100DaysToOffload challenge. Want to get involved? Find out more at 100daystooffload.com

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