Today a friend at the university showed me Loband, a service that simplifies web pages, in order to make them download faster over slow internet connections. Loband strips out colors and images, leaving only the text and links of the original web page. Images are replaced with an “i” logo, and by clicking, you are able to load images on-demand.

Loband doesn't work well with most webmail applications, but has been working great for me for reading news websites. It filters out many of the image heavy advertisements.

To use Loband: just go to http://www.loband.org and type in the URL of the website you would like to simply in the gray bar at the top of the web page. Click “go!” and you should see a text-only version of the website. Loband replaces all the links on the simplified pages automatically with new links that will also be passed through the Loband filter... so you are free to keep browsing around the text-only version of the site. Happy (faster) clicking!!