markdown-url_skill

Overview

This skill routes any target website through https://markdown.new/ so you get a clean, Markdown-friendly view for reading and extraction. It rewrites a URL into the markdown.new-prefixed form, visits that proxy when appropriate, and pulls rendered or raw Markdown for use in summaries, notes, or quoting. The approach prioritizes read-only pages and falls back to the original URL if the proxy is blocked or breaks key functionality.

How this skill works

When given a destination URL, the skill first normalizes it to an absolute URL with an explicit scheme (https:// preferred). It then prefixes the normalized URL with https://markdown.new/ and attempts to load that rewritten URL. If the markdown.new view loads, the skill extracts the rendered or raw Markdown and uses it as the authoritative text source; if the proxy fails (blocked, CAPTCHAs, or partial content), the skill falls back to the original site and uses reader mode or direct text extraction.

When to use it

• Reading public documentation pages to extract clean copyable text.
• Summarizing blog posts, changelogs, or long-form articles for notes or briefings.
• Pulling readable content from GitHub issues, PR discussions, or read-only code docs.
• Creating shareable excerpts, checklists, or meeting notes from web content.
• When you need a Markdown-formatted source for downstream processing or conversion.

Best practices

• Only use markdown.new for read-only pages; avoid for logins, payments, or interactive workflows.
• Normalize to an absolute URL with scheme before prefixing (e.g., example.com -> https://example.com).
• Try markdown.new once; on any block signal (401/403/429, CAPTCHA, empty content), switch immediately to the original URL.
• When falling back, note that markdown.new was blocked and extract text via reader mode or direct copy if needed.
• Do not rewrite local file paths or non-HTTP(S) schemes.

Example use cases

• Convert a docs page to markdown.new, extract the content, and paste formatted release notes into a changelog.
• Open a blog post through markdown.new to copy headings and code snippets into a knowledge base.
• Load a long GitHub issue via markdown.new to summarize discussion points for a stand-up note.
• Fetch a public API guide through markdown.new to generate a quick checklist for integration tasks.
• When markdown.new fails due to rate limits, load the original URL and note the fallback in the summary.