Boost your productivity with Conkeror, Instapaper and a Kindle | Hacker News Reader

Boost your productivity with Conkeror, Instapaper and a Kindle

ceondo.com

88 pointsLoic29 comments

Would anyone like to share how and why they use Instapaper? I tried it out and it seems solid, but I'm not sure on the utility.

Do people use it when they stumble across something they want to read but don't have enough time to read it now? I usually just fast-read/skim to completion anything if I'm in a hurray, and don't tune into HN or RSS if I don't have time. But I feel like I might be missing something, would someone care to share their experience/use of Instapaper?

I use Instapaper all the time. When I have 5 minutes before a meeting at work or early in the morning before I leave the house. The main thing I do is when I only have a small amount of time, I scan my normal sites for interesting articles and use the "Read Later" bookmarklet to add it to my reading list. I may add 20 things to the list in a quick 5 minute scan of HN, ESPN, Ars, & my email with links from friends of things like "gotta read this" or the like. Then when I have a bunch of free time (usually at night before bed), I sit down at my computer (or iPhone/iPad) and read through things I have saved. The text-only view on the iPhone and iPad is great.

I guess if you regularly have large chunks of time throughout a day, you would not need Instapaper. But if you are regularly running around all day with little to no downtime, it is nice to be able to sit down to one place and read through the days material.

I gotcha - thanks. Yeah, I set my own schedule and I try to do things in semi-large blocks. I can see where the utility would be if I'm scheduled up with lots of things to do, cheers.

I've enhanced Instapaper experience with Firefox addon where you can select part of article that you are interested in and bookmark it or bookmark without visting it. Also there are utils that help you to get notifications from Instapaper via xmpp updates on http://instaright.appspot.com

I use Instapaper mainly in association with my twitter client.(Ubertwitter) If I come across interesting links, I can send them to instapaper to read on my computer instead of my mobile.

I used it more during my last job where I spent 2.5 hours on the train every day. I am the last software engineer on earth who does not have a smartphone. So I'd instapaper long form articles on the web and read them on my kindle during my commute.

I do the same thing as this guy, though with Firefox rather than conqueror. It's great. I'd MUCH rather read a lengthy article on my Kindle than on my computer, and Instapaper is the only one-click method of getting it there that I know of.

Beyond that I'd sooner just click Readability and leave the tab open until I get to it.

I use it in conjunction with my e-reader (Sony) and Calibre. I have a bookmarklet I use to send long-ish articles to Instapaper, then I read them on the reader.

To be honest though, it's basically just an excuse to use the e-reader.

I use it to read articles while commuting (often in subways where net is unavailable)

  Do people use it when they stumble across something they want to read but
  don't have enough time to read it now?

Exactly that. With the iPhone app I have the stuff available offline, which is great during my daily train commute.

I think some people do have need for service like Instapaper. I just bookmark what I want to read in a "Inbox" folder on bookmark bar (or you can named it "Read-Later"). Then read it later. For conversion to text based reading, use Readability or viewtext.org. For bookmarks sync with multiple devices, xmark or mobile.me or Chrome bookmark sync.

I've actually been kicking around the idea of making a web app similar to Instapaper, but specifically tailored for the Kindle. I was thinking of adding priority articles (articles you want on your kindle next), with other articles as filler (ones you want to read, but will be bumped if you find a more important/interesting article). Does Instapaper fill this need for most people?

Um, is it really worth it? You add a level of complexity and anyway at the end of the day, if you have all your articles on the Kindle you can always access the TOC of your Instapaper issue to jump to the ones you want to read. Personally, I would not need such classification system.

Note that usually I only have a handful of articles to read, so I am probably not the right user for such improved system.

I have a huge back-log of articles in Instapaper, but there are definitely articles that come up that I want to read right away, so I think the priority system would help for me. Another thought was to add RSS feeds as well, with priority filtering on them as well.

You have Kindlefeeder[1] for feeds. I have not tested it, but it is recommended by Instapaper for people willing to read feeds on the Kindle.

[1]: http://www.kindlefeeder.com/

I know about kindlefeeder, but my thought was combining a prioritized Instapaper with a prioritized Kindlefeeder, to give you a daily digest of articles you'd like to read. Backlog and lower priority feeds would fill the digests when you dont have new, high priority articles to read. If you used Instapaper + Kindlefeeder, you'd have 2 digests to read.

Combine that with a hack in the social features of the Kindle to kind of mark "I liked it" or "Not so good" and you can get a machine learning algorithm to automatically select the articles to put up in the list. Sweet :)

Create then iterate ;) Thats further down the road.

Doesn't instapaper already integrate with Kindle? You can have instapaper email you a .mobi file to your @kindle account with links to text only version of the saved pages.

It does, but I think Instapaper randomly grabs articles from your backlog. My idea is to have some sort of priority attached to articles

I see. Either way, reading articles from web on Kindle is definitely the way to go.

If you are a vimperator user you can do something similar with the InstaPaper plugin: http://code.google.com/p/vimperator-labs/issues/detail?id=11...

The thing I like best about vimperator is that it is a standard Firefox plugin. My understanding of Conkerer is that it is a standalone app.

I use Read It Later's Firefox plugin + the iPad app all the time now. If I get past the first two lines of a post/article I click the read it later icon in my toolbar and then read the rest that night in bed. I also used it this weekend to store some pages from WikiTravel when we decided to take a short weekend vacation with the kids to Montreal.

Sorry, but I don't see the big deal with Instapaper, using Chrome and syncing my bookmarks is simple enough.

It doesn't warrant me using another service, just simply creating a new bookmark folder to access from my work, home and laptop pcs

It seems quite useful to me. I differentiate between bookmarks and things in my reading queue. Also instapaper has 2 neat features 1) they generate a text only version of each saved page 2) they can automatically send your 'to read' in-box to your kindle as a .mobi file. Reading a text only version of a webpage on my kindle is ideal.

Man, I wish Instapaper let you create articles out of multi-page things. It'd be even good enough if I could say, "This is the next part of this other story", manually.

I personally found it more pleasing to print web pages to pdf and copy them to the kindle via usb. But this wouldn't be exciting enough to blog about.

I LOVE conkeror.

I also like conkeror much and use it everyday. However, I recently encountered the same nightmare that made me abandon firefox altogether: insane memory leak from its UI engine: XULRunner. The chronic memory accumulation as high as 1,000,000,000 bytes when I have only one tab open makes me wonder why the heck there's no alternative to XULRunner, a super poor implementation of XUL. (Does it ever release its memory? I do wonder.) If it can be replaced, I would recommend conkeror with confidence to anyone.

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