I recently implemented a small hint showing the reading time of an article in my blog. This is a functionality used quite much when reading some technical articles written by the developer community. It helps me to decide whether I have the time to read an article just now or if I'm going to put it on my stack. So I thought it would be nice to provide my readers with the same flexibility.

According to Medium the reading time is based on the average reading speed of an adult (roughly 265 words per minute).

To get a basic implementation of this I could get rid of the Markdown markings and count the words by splitting the string by spaces. Images add additional time to the reading time and this approach would not consider that.

Luckily I found a nice npm package reading-time that does this for me. It can handle plain text, HTML, and markdown.

All I need to do is install the package.

npm install reading-time --save-dev

And use it to convert my markdown content to an estimated reading time

import readingTime, { ReadTimeResults } from 'reading-time';

const result = readingTime(post.content)

The result contains several properties. I can get the text 3 min read by accessing result.text or alternatively the reading time as a time result.time, in minutes result.minutes and the word count result.words.

In the end, it was very simple for me to integrate an estimated reading time into my blog.