I can't seem to figure this out. I've been trying out different news aggregator sites to use as a home page. Right now I'm using skimfeed. I like it, but the links all have skimfeed baggage tacked on. Like this: https://skimfeed.com/r.php?q=1148&l=15649995&u=https%3A%2F%2Fxkcd.com%2F3006%2F
Well, the source looks like this:
<span class='boxtitles'><h2><a class='siteurls ts33' href='/news/xkcd.html'>XKCD</a> <a class='siteurls atat' href='http://xkcd.com' rel='nofollow' target='_blank'>+</a></h2></span>
<ul><li class='nl1 bd33'><a href='r.php?q=1148&l=15649995&u=https%3A%2F%2Fxkcd.com%2F3006%2F' target='_blank' rel='nofollow' title='Demons'>Demons</a> </li><li class='nl2 bd75'><a href='r.php?q=1148&l=15642742&u=https%3A%2F%2Fxkcd.com%2F3005%2F' target='_blank' rel='nofollow' </li></ul></div>
Which, to be honest, is Greek to me. I'd like to rewrite the links so that they just look like https://xkcd.com/3006/ I don't really care what the link looks like, per se, the encoded bits. I just don't like the extra skimfeed stuff. Aesthetically.
Is there an extension or something that will help me with this? The couple I've looked at are either too complicated for my caveman brain, or site specific (i.e., remove google tracking). If I'm just being a little too retentive, feel free to let me know that too.
Tampermonkey will do what you need. It's not point and click, but writing the custom script shouldn't be too difficult for someone very new. You essentially just need to complete a find and replace upon page load. The %2F and similar costs are just ASCII characters in percent-encoding and can easily be parsed.
I'm unsure what benefit you get from this though. It seems skimfeed is just trying to capture which lists and posts get visited so they can adjust the site according to popularity. Doing this via an exit link removes any need for cookies (which I didn't check for, so maybe this ain't what they're using it for).
Not much, to be honest. Links seem to load a lot quicker with the urls simplified. Other than that, no real reason to do it.