The world as frankps sees it!
Instapaper: Take the news with you
Instapaper is a perfect example of useful cloud computing. A service that lets you “bookmark” articles that you wish to read later, in the chair or in a spare moment, as for example the subway to and from work. A lot of people have been blogging about it lately.
By adding a Read Later button in your browser’s toolbar, articles will get stored on the Instapaper site:
To read the articles you can later visit the Instapaper site and read them. But is more useful is to use the Pro [iTunes link] or the Lite [iTunes link] version of Instapaper for the iPhone. If you have five minutes free, you can read an article or two. For longer articles, I prefer to read them on an ereader. Both Mobipocket and ePub are supported, so articles can be read on the Kindles, Nook, Cybook and Sony boards:
One of the most beneficial things about Instapaper, is that the service “peels away” both the right and left column of the sites, gone is all Flash content, javascripts, and comments. Moreover, images are reduced in size, fonts and text formatting are changed for improved readability, all this so that you can sit down and read the article comfortably. You will simply not get disturbed by the online newspaper’s desire to get you to also read other articles and click your way around.
(here I found a small bug in Epub implementation – can you see it?)
I find it wonderful to be able sink down on the sofa after coming home from the gym, and read articles from my favorite technology and media writers, as Ed Bott, Jean-Lois Gassée (CEO Be Inc.) og Frédéric Filloux (editor in Norwegian Schibsted-group, Paris).
I’m an frequent user of Google Reader, both on my desktop computers and on my mobile phone. On my Mac I use NetNewsWire to follow the newssites that I have subscribed to. It lets me send articles that I find interesting to Instapaper, and the same does the iPhone application Reeder. Unfortunately FeedDemon (Windows), form the same software house that makes NetNewsWire, doesn’t have this functionality built in. But in the end of the article, I will show you how you can add send to Instapaper functionality to FeedDemon.
When some of my friends twitrer about an interesting article or a news bulletin, which they think others should read, I do it in the same way with Tweetie on my iPhone:
A web service suggesting articles to read
Also be sure to have a look at Instapaper’s most frequently bookmarked articles at Give Me Something to Read (www.givemesomethingtoread.com). It is an eclectic list of magazine articles and short fiction from publications like The Atlantic, Seed magazine, and The New Republic.
A small summary
Instapaper is a service allows you to “bookmark” news and articles for later reading. The service has, with Google Reader, iPhone, and my ereader, changed my reading habits last year quite a bit! I read more news than ever, as I can better decide when and how I want to read the news that interests me.
If you are interested in learning more about Instapaper, the developer has a blog that gets frequently updated.
FeedDemon – Send to Instapaper
Well, I must honestly admit that I struggled to get this to work on FeedDemon. It was not easy, but it’s great fun to manage to solve problems yourself. I found an article on an Australian blog, that told me to create a XML-file with the name instapaper.xml and with the following content:
<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”utf-8″?>
<fdsendto template=”http://www.instapaper.com/b?v=3&u={url}&t={title}&s={summary-plain}” service=”Instapaper” />
I’m running Windows 7 (x64), and the installation routine for FeedDemon is not the best one, so the programme files ended up in the folder Users/frankps_loc/AppData/Local/FeedDemon (note that the folder AppData by default is hidden).
The problem was not to create the file. That was the easy part, but I struggled with getting the Send to button to appear in FeedDemon. This is enabled under Tools → Options → Reading → Newspaper Icons, and it that window you have to activate the Send to.
On each news entry in FeedDemon, you will now find an arrow that points to the right. By clicking on this arrow, you will activate a context menu that contains a link to Instapaper. The first time you send an article to Instapaper, you are asked to write in your username and password to your Instapaper account.
