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13ft

One article should not require a subscription, an account, and your tracking consent. 13ft is a self-hosted alternative to the defunct 12ft.io that fetches web articles the way a search-engine crawler receives them, then shows you the clean page without paywall walls, ad clutter, and pop-up nonsense attached. Paste a link into the single input, or better, install the companion bookmarklet: one click on any article page rewrites the address to your own server, and the reading copy comes back from infrastructure you control. Because it is yours, there is no third-party service logging every article you read, no central site that can be taken down and strand the habit, and nobody selling a premium tier of unblocking. It handles the stubborn cases with a loading page and multiple fallback retrieval methods that kick in when the first approach fails, ships localised interface strings in several languages, and the whole thing is one small application that runs from a container and sits politely behind a reverse proxy. Casual readers reclaim the occasional long-form piece; researchers and archivists get a reproducible way to fetch the same copy a search index saw. Running on a dedicated VPS on RepoCloud with guaranteed CPU, RAM, and SSD, full root SSH access, and a browser serial console. MIT licensed.

13ft
13ft

Benefits

  • Your Reader, Your Server
  • Unlike the defunct central service, a self-hosted instance cannot be shut down under you, and it never logs which articles your household reads each evening.
  • One Click From Any Article
  • The bookmarklet rewrites the current page address to your server, so unblocking a piece becomes a single click instead of copying links between tabs.
  • No Account, No Tracking Consent
  • Reading copies arrive without subscription walls, newsletter pop-ups, and consent banners, which returns long-form articles to being documents rather than conversion funnels.
  • Fallbacks For Stubborn Sites
  • A loading page and several retrieval strategies handle sites that block the first attempt, improving the odds on stronger paywalls automatically.

Features

  • Crawler-View Retrieval
  • The server requests pages as Googlebot, receiving the full indexable copy publishers serve to search engines, then presents it cleanly to the reader.
  • Paste Or Prefix Access
  • Submit links through the web form or append any URL after the server address, which makes scripting and bookmarklets trivial to wire up.
  • Localised Interface
  • UI strings ship in English, German, French, and Korean, with community locale files making additional languages a translation exercise.
  • Container Or Bare Python
  • Run the published container image, or the single Flask application under Gunicorn with a chosen host and port behind your reverse proxy.

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