Easy Reader is a WordPress plugin that lets your readers open an easy to read version of your blog posts. When your reader clicks the “easy reader” button, she’ll be shown a stripped down version of your post.

Download: Easy Reader
Demo: Click the easy reader button above. It’s bright and green!
Tested: WordPress 3.0+, but should work with earlier versions.

When you built your blog, you probably found a theme that looked good and matched your unique style. That’s great! That’s what blogging is about. But all that styling distracts your readers from your content and slows down their reading speed. This is especially true if your theme uses small, mystifying text.

Easy Reader means that you can keep your blog looking the way you want it, while still giving your readers the ideal reading experience.

How much time do your readers spend reading your blog posts? Lets say you have a medium sized blog, with 200 reads per day. Assuming that a typical reader will take 3 minutes to read the average blog post, your readers will spend about 10 hours per day reading your content.

Lets say that 20% of your readers take advantage of your Easy Reader feature, and it cuts down their reading time by 10%. This means that you could save your readers 12 minutes every day. That’s a total of 3 days saved over a year!

Making a Difference

So every blogger that installs Easy Reader is potentially saving 3 days of their reader’s time. That’s time they could spend making a difference in the world – working on opensource projects, spending time with family or working in the community.

After you install Easy Reader on your blog, contact other bloggers and suggest they install Easy Reader too. Better yet, write a post about Easy Reader.

It’s something small, but if we reach the goal of having Easy Reader installed on 10,000 blogs, that’ll save the world 83 days of reading time – every single day!

Setting It Up

After you install the plugin, it’ll automatically put an easy reader button at the top of each of your posts. You can configure how and where Easy Reader displays this button by going to Settings > Easy Reader in WordPress admin.

Another useful feature of Easy Reader is the share buttons at the bottom of the Easy Reader window. This allows your readers to take the logical next step and share your post after they’ve finished reading it. You can choose which buttons Easy Reader will display in the settings panel.

If you want ultimate control over where the Easy Reader button appears in your post you can set “Insert Easy Reader Button” to “Never” and use the easy_reader_button function in your theme.

easy_reader_button($color, $size, $class, $return)

$color is the colour of the button. At the moment your options are ‘green’, ‘blue’ and ‘grey’.
$size is the size of the button. At the moment your only option is the default – ‘normal’.
$class is any additional classes added to the button container.
$return if this is true it’ll return a string instead of print it. Defaults to false.

Future Development

This plugin is still at version 0.1. As I work towards version 1.0 I’ll add more features and clean up existing functionality. If there’s anything you’d like to see in Easy Reader, please let me know in the comments.