Wheels of Misfortune, or how to use Web Dev Console

February 7, 2026

I just tried to comment to something on facebook (declined, probably because it was too long) and figured it was worth making a little post about it. There are websites that sell stuff (case in point rhymes with emu) that put a widget that is supposed to give you ia random discount based on you picking something, sometimes it looks like the wheel from that fortune tv shoe. I just x past those wheels of misfortune when I see them.

Tip #1: Assuming you’re on a laptop or desktop: Right click on the thing, select “inspect”. It opens a window to the right (this is the web developer’s console) with a lot of code in it. Click “delete” and it removes that element from your screen. Close the scary window. Often things will work ok for you.

This is also handy for websites like Flickr that don’t let you right click to save a picture. They put a couple layers over the image you’re trying to get to. You have to do it 2-3 times on Flickr before you can get at your picture.

Tip #2: Some of my content starts out as posts on facebook or articles from places like NYT I have found interesting and want to save for later reference or share here. The way I do it is to right click the post or article. The console pops up on the right. It will also put a box over the part that you are inspecting, it’s usually just one paragraph. If you move your mouse up and down, different parts of the post or page will be highlighted. It’s an indented list, and if you go far enough up, you will see the whole post or article without the rest of the page. Right click, go to Copy -> and select OuterHTML. This will grab the HTML that renders the artcle.

Go to text editor. I use linux so it’s usually vim. Paste that into the document, save it as a .html file. You can stop there, if you open that file in a browser and it’ll probably be useful, but there are probably and crap in there. I have a script called html2md that will convert that html file to a markdown file wiht extension .md which is something I can edit. If it’s facebook, you might have some more work to do. Many links in the article get converted to something the size of a paragraph and the name of the link has been changed from www.somesiteorither.com to www.some…. If you look carefully in the paragraph, the website is in there but the rest of it is tracking crap that Facebook uses to surveil you.

The website will be a little tricky to find because any slash / characters will be converted to backslash-slash and anything that isn’t a letter or number will be a code that starts with a percent sign. Sometimes it’s easier to just right click on the link in facebook and open it in a new tab. It’ll still be really long, and there will be things that start with fb. 90% of the time, you can strip off anything to the right of the question mark ? to get the untracked URL to the website. I put that into the markdown file instead of the paragraph. I do some other magic to make it clickable but unless you care about website generators that convert html to markdown you probably don’t need it. Bookmark that instead of the link that facebook gave you or they’ll still be tracking you every time you share or open that page.

Scroll through, delete the chunks that are ads, and save it so it can be shared here.

Drop me an email if you have questions. The commenting isn’t always working, but someone sent me an email based on something I wrote here, so that part works at least.

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