Bummer. I love and use instapaper, gathering articles for a few weeks to read at altitude. It's a great product, and I paid for a subscription these last years in the hopes that I could therefore continue to enjoy it.
Now it's sold to Pinterest, one of the two sites I don't bother with links to—because I know Pinterest and Quora will require me to sign in rather than show me what they showed a search engine.
What else operates in this space? Pocket, I remember. ReadItLater used to exist, maybe still? Does Pinboard do this somehow, maybe with an RSS reader? Or do I have to pay for Paperback?
Thanks for the link to Wallabag, I had never heard of it. Looks very interesting.
I use Pinboard, and pay for the archiving option. I even periodically request a tarball of the archive for my own backup. Pinboard archives the entire page, not just a readable version of the content. For archival and reference purposes, I like this. It would be nice if Pinboard also provided a readable option. In fact, a number of the apps that work with Pinboard add support for readable versions.
I will look into adding Wallabag into my workflow.
I'm cool with the idea of providing a readable option in Pinboard, since I already do something similar to get the text out of the page for indexing. Any library for this you particularly like?
Readability (https://github.com/luin/readability) is a classic, and included as part of Firefox (I think, maybe that's been discontinued). It's essentially a bag of hand-written heuristics but they're pretty good heuristics.
Some interesting reading is Christian Kohlschütter's thesis on this problem, which is framed in academia as "how do we assemble good text corpuses from webpages for data analysis, which means removing junk (boilerplate) from our HTML crawls" (https://code.google.com/archive/p/boilerpipe/wikis/WSDM2010P...). Boilerpipe would probably be the right way to go, but if you're not using Java it could be harder to integrate.
This would be great! A while back I signed up for Paperback (https://readpaperback.com/) to handle this for my Pinboard account, and then wrote my own using the Ruby Readability library.
Hopefully you see this. The biggest reason I stick with Pocket (despite the privacy implications) is because of its text-to-speech functionality. AFAIK, Pinboard is a website only, so TTS is out of the question. However, might this change in the future?
There is a great app called Voice Dream reader on iOS that takes text from a variety of sources and can do TTS. I think I paid $9.99 for it and bought an Inova voice for $4.99. I love it. I use it to have custom study guides read to me, ePubs, PDFs, text documents and my Instapaper queue.
I don't know what is the state of the art for a general content extractor. (I have done a fair amount of one off web scrapers, for data collection, but nothing this generic)
If you're on macOS / iOS, you can use the reading list. When you add items to your reading list from Safari, they get synced to your iOS device so you can read them offline from any of your devices.
I use Mobile Safari on iOS but Chrome on macOS. This means that, as much as I love Safari's Reading List, it's basically "unavailable" to me on the desktop. To put something in the Reading List from Chrome, I have to focus the URL bar, copy the URL, open Safari, paste and go to the URL, and then ⌘⇧D to put it in the list. (I can also right-click on the URL bar in Chrome and use the "Add to Reading List" OS Service, but the mousing involved is actually nearly as much work as the series of keyboard-gestures in the above.)
The fact that there's no way to get anything to actively sync between Chrome and iCloud is maddening. Why has nobody reverse-engineered the iCloud API and made a Chrome extension to talk to it?
I go the other way, sending pages from Safari to Chrome when I need Flash content, using a TextExpander snippet. It's not a perfect solution for you, but it might help.
Here's the code, which I have tied to "stc " (send to Chrome). [Ha! In typing the snippet shortcut, of course, I sent this very page to Chrome. :-)]
property theURL : ""
tell application "Safari"
set theURL to URL of current tab of window 1
end tell
if appIsRunning("Google Chrome") then
tell application "Google Chrome"
make new window
set URL of active tab of window 0 to theURL
activate
end tell
else
tell application "Google Chrome"
do shell script "open -a \"Google Chrome\""
set URL of active tab of window 0 to theURL
activate
end tell
end if
on appIsRunning(appName)
tell application "System Events" to (name of processes) contains appName
end appIsRunning
Slightly easier — click and hold in the URL bar and drag to the Safari icon.
I also wrote a short AppleScript called Tab Transporter to move tabs between browsers. It's configured to go from Safari to Chrome but you could reverse that easily. I activate it via Alfred.
I only use Safari, so I can't test if this still works, but have a look at this Stack Exchange thread on sending a non-Safari tab to Safari Reading List
> Why has nobody reverse-engineered the iCloud API and made a Chrome extension to talk to it?
If you can reverse engineer iCloud and bypass its security there are a lot more lucrative pursuits than making a Chrome extension for your reading list.
Who said anything about bypassing security? I was presuming the extension would just "walk in the front door" by getting the user to log into it with their iCloud credentials, and then passing those to the server. Or are you saying that the iCloud protocols are obfuscated/DRMed above-and-beyond just having regular AAA constraints applied to them?
iCloud is not a free for all, it's meant to share data within your app or within your org's group of apps (e.g. all Google apps). The Reading List data is within Apple's own container and you would not have access to it through conventional tools.
This is typically a good thing because syncing is hard enough when you control both ends, having arbitrary programs messing with your data is a recipe for disaster.
Ah, this is what had me confused: I was assuming that the parts of "iCloud" that preceded the creation of the Ubiquity sync protocol (e.g. Safari bookmark sync, Notes and Reminders, Calendars, etc.) just stayed WebDAV-based with their CoreData databases being purely local+ephemeral, rather than migrating over into using full-on Ubiquity-synced CoreData stores. (I swear you can still export e.g. CalDAV calendar URLs from Calendars.app for iCloud calendars, and these CalDAV resources are writable if you want them to be. Or am I misremembering?)
Still, even with the way iCloud works, you don't need to directly prod the data. If you want to manipulate Safari's container, you can prod Safari itself into doing so. OSA is no COM, but it works just fine for this sort of thing. (And if you can't manage to make it do so, you can write a Safari plug-in presenting a locally-bound HTTP API that the Chrome extension can talk to.)
Now, the real challenge would be doing this syncing as part of some "syncing service" running on a cloud VM somewhere, that doesn't actually want to run thousands of headless copies of Safari. That's what I really want: the ability to sync Chrome with iCloud even if I currently have no active iCloud-attached devices. Probably the simplest way to do this is to write your own Ubiquity+CoreData client libraries and present yourself as another device that wants to sync against the iCloud account. It'd be up to you from there to safely munge the CoreData object hierarchy in a way resembling the official clients, but at least you'd be able to linearize those updates against iCloud messages.
Reading List is fine, though I wish it offered highlighting or note taking features.
I also tend to stuff my Instapaper full of hundreds of links which it handles no problem, but Reading List really crumbles adding a bunch at once when it tries to download everything.
The iOS reading list frequently fails to sync offline content to my device, stranding me contentless on airplanes. It's incredibly annoying, and is specifically why I began using Instapaper.
Pinboard has a read-it-later feature. It works for me, and I know it won't change suddenly out from under me (unless idlewords gets hit by a bus, but eh).
"It works, it's nice and fast, and will continue to work the same way for the foreseeable future" is pretty much the highest praise I can give a service like this, and Pinboard nails that aspect.
Is there any iOS app that supports offline reading of bookmarks? I already have pinner, which has a decent parser, but afaik redownloads and reparses on access.
I use PinDroid on Android. I mostly bookmark things on mobile to read on a bigger screen though, so I can't comment on how it works the other direction.
I mean, kinda. The bookmark is marked unread, but Pinboard does not have anything like a text stripper / really nice interface for reading articles. Though I'm sure you could combine it with Readability's bookmarklets to make a workflow without notes / highlights.
The post says that, at least for the time being, nothing is going to change for their users. Hopefully you wont be forced to sign into Pinterest to use Instapaper.
> The post says that, at least for the time being, nothing is going to change for their users.
Except a new third party (Pinterest) will sooner or later have access to my Instapaper data. I trusted Instapaper because they had a sustainable business model not based around ads. I do not trust Pinterest because their business model is based around selling my personal information and activity to advertisers.
But no one on this thread believes it. It certainly says something, and not a good thing, about the startup ecosystem when "in the know" people like us automatically treat news of an acquisition as a death sentence for the product, even if the team claims otherwise.
Anyway, I'm probably going to replace my Instapaper with a self-hosted alternative instead of hoping yet another company stays in business long enough.
I have been using it for three months now, and it works flawlessly. I was using Pocket, but sometimes after I would save links with their iPhone app, I would go into their web interface to view them at a later time, and those links would be gone.
But I have not had one single link disappear from raindrop.io since I have been using it.
It's fairly early stage but I've been actively building an alternative to Instapaper called Filltray (https://filltray.com/guest). Please feel free to follow @filltray to keep up to date with my progress.
Your product sounds interesting, especially the longterm roadmap. If you can replace Feedly as an bucket of RSS feeds to scan + Instapaper for reading & note taking, that'd be pretty sweet.
There's a long term roadmap for saving links into conceptual "trays" which will be programmable (via a custom lambda type system which would allow for you to have a lot of flexibility). Alongside this, I'm passionate about ensuring Filltray works to surface your links that are still relevant in your life (and forgetting links you've forgotten about). There's a huge amount of room for improvement in this space especially with simple wins like using waybackmachine for permanent archives of webpages (built) and giving users the ability to retrieve contextual information about their links. Where were you, what device were you using, what time was it. Its simple to save something for later. Getting you back to _why_ is the important bit!
Evernote is a surprisingly good alternative. I switched to it from Instapaper (which I really liked) because I could save article along with notes, file them with other notes and stuff, etc. With Instapaper I felt like I was saving things that I'd read in one silo (my RSS reader) into another. For how I work, web articles are just one set of things I want to sort together (actually I mostly use tags instead of notebooks)
Unfortunately the "read at altitude" is a paid feature, at least for tablets and phones (maybe windows/mac too, I don't know). So that might make it not work for you.
I think it was already the case that the content shown in the search result had to be viewable on the site. This link seems to be more about annoyances?
Another player is BeeLine Reader. It offers an article-saving feature on iOS and can also pull from Pocket/Instapaper/Readability. And unlike some competitors, it does not track reading habits or sell personal data. [discl: I am the founder]
> For you, the Instapaper end user and customer, nothing changes. The Instapaper team will be moving from betaworks in New York City to Pinterest’s headquarters in San Francisco, and we’ll continue to make Instapaper a great place to save and read articles.
Now it's sold to Pinterest, one of the two sites I don't bother with links to—because I know Pinterest and Quora will require me to sign in rather than show me what they showed a search engine.
What else operates in this space? Pocket, I remember. ReadItLater used to exist, maybe still? Does Pinboard do this somehow, maybe with an RSS reader? Or do I have to pay for Paperback?