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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 year
by brians 10y ago
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?
- disposition2 10y agoWallabag (https://www.wallabag.org/ https://www.wallabag.org/) if you want self-hosted. Pinboard (https://pinboard.in https://pinboard.in) offers archiving for (I believe) $25 a year. Or Pocket (https://getpocket.com/ https://getpocket.com/) which used to be Read-It-Later.
- leejoramo 10y agoThanks 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.
- idlewords 10y agoI'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?
- kough 10y agoReadability (https://github.com/luin/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/WSDM2010Paper.wiki 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.
- userhacker 10y agoI second Readability, it works great for article heavy webpages. I used it to build a reading time estimator for chrome https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/read-time/nccohhimobidpghgpnejnbkpoichbbml https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/read-time/nccohhim... and its open source https://github.com/usergit/read-time https://github.com/usergit/read-time bonus, you can click on the extension to show only the main content of the page
- cpeterso 10y agoFirefox maintains a fork of Readability for Firefox's reader mode here: https://github.com/mozilla/readability https://github.com/mozilla/readability
- Veen 10y agoPaperback offers a reasonably good reading experience for Pinboard links. https://readpaperback.com https://readpaperback.com
- tedmiston 10y agoPaperback looks interesting. I don't see it mentioned, but does it support highlighting & notes? The demo seems to be broken for me.
- jasikpark 10y agoOne option is to have a browser that can render webpages in reading mode like safari on iOS. Hopefully chrome and Firefox have extensions as well.
- miguelrochefort 10y agoIt's funny how even after all those years, people still feel the need to mention "formerly Read It Later" when they talk about Pocket.
- eriknstr 10y agoWell, given that the parent to the comment you replied to said >Pocket, I remember. ReadItLater used to exist, maybe still? there was an obvious reason to name Pocket as "formerly Read It Later"
- athenot 10y agoIf 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. It does require iCloud but nothing beyond that.
- osi 10y agoI wish the reading list was available via the browser so I could access it on my Linux desktop at work. That's the only reason I don't use it :/
- derefr 10y agoI 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?
- pcl 10y agoI've recently switched my primary browsing back to Safari on my 2012-era MacBook Air. Battery life is noticeably better. I still launch Chrome and FF regularly for development, but my tab-hell lives in Safari now.
- tedmiston 10y agoPlug: OneTab for Chrome or Pinboard > Save tab set (in Chrome/Safari) are my best routes out of tab hell. I find Safari often becomes unusable with 30–50 tabs.
- freehunter 10y ago
- jeffrand 10y agoThe 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.
- Analemma_ 10y agoBut 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.
- AlexandrB 10y ago> 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. Basically it's time to stop using Instapaper :(
- bthdonohue 10y agoThat will not be the case, Jeff.
- Arcsech 10y agoPinboard 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.
- mrdan 10y agoIs 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.
- lukasb 10y agoDo you have a mobile client you like? I remember being frustrated by what I could find for Pinboard, as far as replacing Instapaper.
- dorian-graph 10y agohttp://thesweetsetup.com/apps/best-pinboard-app-ios/ http://thesweetsetup.com/apps/best-pinboard-app-ios/ It might be helpful for you to have a look through there and see if any of them have a stand out 'read it later' experience.
- tedmiston 10y agoI enjoy Pinner for iOS - http://pinnerapp.net/ http://pinnerapp.net/.
- pixelcloud 10y agoReadability and Pocket.
- lovamova 10y agoReadability.
- KarlFreeman 10y agoIt's fairly early stage but I've been actively building an alternative to Instapaper called Filltray (https://filltray.com/guest https://filltray.com/guest). Please feel free to follow @filltray to keep up to date with my progress.
- NoGravitas 10y agoWhat would this offer to differentiate itself from Wallabag?
- KarlFreeman 10y agoThere'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!
- tedmiston 10y agoYour 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. The pricing page is blank for me.
- cvburgess 10y agoI really like http://raindrop.io http://raindrop.io - its pretty, easy, and has a mobile app / chrome extension.
- Philipp__ 10y agoThis looks interesting. Will give it a shot!
- fraXis 10y agoI second raindrop.io. 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.
- cstuder 10y agoThey have hidden their pricing well: https://raindrop.io/pages/pricing https://raindrop.io/pages/pricing 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.
- sambe 10y agoAgree. This happened to two other services I like this week as well. It's been puzzling me for a while though: doesn't Google punish the behaviour you mention?
- bigethan 10y agoNot yet, but soon: https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2016/08/helping-users-easily-access-content-on.html https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2016/08/helping-users-easi...
- sambe 10y agoI 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?
- mikeevans 10y agoReadItLater became Pocket, I think.
- minikomi 10y agoUsually I use PushToKindle ... much prefer reading on my kindle to a screen.
- lettergram 10y agoFeedly
- gnicholas 10y agoAnother 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]
- robbyking 10y agoThe press release does specifically say: > 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.
- oblio 10y agoTrue, but that's what they always say. See: https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/ https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/
- executesorder66 10y agoUse tampermoneky/greasemonkey browser extension, and add a user script to disable that "please log in" shit. It works for me.
- cheshire137 10y agoI really like Pocket myself. Good support across mobile and desktop.
- gumby 10y agoEvernote 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.