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UK Paper’s Website Lets Readers Avoid Royal Baby News With One Click

The Guardian knows that some of its readers are done caring about the royal baby before it even gets here, and offers those readers a "mute" option for their coverage.

Before

As you’ve no doubt heard this morning honest-to-goodness, real life princess (OK, Duchess of Cambridge, technically) Kate Middleton has gone into labor at a UK hospital, meaning we will soon have a brand new royal baby on the planet. While this is news that a frankly shocking number of people seem to care about real hard, we’re hard pressed to care about it as much as we apparently should. We’re not alone in being ready for the royal baby news to just stop, though. British paper The Guardian is offering readers on the UK edition of its site the option to eliminate its front page section of constantly updating royal baby news with just one click.

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The picture above is the default homepage for the UK edition of The Guardian today, and it’s unsurprisingly all royal baby, all the time. That centerpiece, though, which contains more information on gynecologists to the royal family than a sane, healthy person who is not Kate Middleton will ever need to know, can be turned off by hitting the “Republican?” button in the top right corner, which minimizes the royal baby news into a single bar, like so.

After

Clicking the same button again — this time marked “Royalist?” will bring back the baby news coverage, front and center. Unfortunately, the button is only available for readers of the UK edition of the site, so international readers of The Guardian — this includes yours truly on a reasonably regular basis — will still be subjected to constant royal baby updates, helpless without a button marked “Just Don’t Give A Damn.” At least until we switch to the UK or Australia editions.

Look, we’re not out to be joy kills, here. Seriously — congratulations to Kate and her husband Prince William on the birth. Sincerely. It’s great news and we wish them the best of luck. See? We’re happy for them. It’s just that we also have things in our life to do that are not “be happy for William and Kate and excited about their baby.” So can we please be excused from seeing wall-to-wall coverage on every news channel and website today?

…I’m being told we cannot, and will be required to spend the rest of the day wading through an Internet in which everything in covered in a thin, greasy sheen of “royal baby.” It’s as gross as it sounds.

C’est la vie. Such is life in the 24-hour news cycle. What we really want to know, though, was where was this technology when the Zimmerman trial was going on last week? In fact, if we have this option, why am I ever looking at any news story that includes the word “Kardashian?” I don’t even care about the gaping holes that would leave in pretty much every site ever — it’s literally all I want right now.

Before we forget, if you do want the latest royal baby news today — and it’s possible, as “anglophiles” and “Geekosystem readers” constitutes a fairly significant Venn diagram — be sure to head over to our sibling site, Gossip Cop where you can follow the whole affair live. They’re totally awesome at exactly this sort of thing, and today is no exception.

(via The Drum, image via The Guardian)

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