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I'd be interested to know what services like Instapaper are used by HN members. Personally I've always wanted to like Instapaper more. I really do. I've given

I'd be interested to know what services like Instapaper are used by HN members. Personally I've always wanted to like Instapaper more. I really do. I've given it a few extended runs, on it's own, and parallel to Pocket; but I always end up moving back to Pocket.

joekrill 10y ago
I recently switched from Pocket to a self-hosted instance of Wallabag (https://wallabag.org https://wallabag.org) and I've been very happy with it. One thing I've noticed with these types of services is that they quickly start becoming intrusive and annoying. Ads are the obvious annoyance. But as an additional example, the Pocket extension injects code into certain sites (HackerNews being one) so that I can "more easily" "pocket" posted articles directly from the listing page itself. And in fairness it can be disabled, but it's enabled by default. And with things like this, I just find that simpler is better. I don't need all these extra features being pushed and modifying my browsing experience "by default".
- dangoldin 10y ago
  I had some issues getting the Wallabag app working on a smartphone. Have you used that successfully?
  - joekrill 10y ago
    I've had no problems at all. I use it primarily on my Android tablet (Nvidia Shield K1), and occasionally on my phone (also Android, Moto X Pure 2015). I haven't noticed any problems. I use it for both reading and adding using the built-in sharing functionality in Android. For setup I simply set my URL, username, and password in the settings and used the "Autofill" option to handle populating the rest of the settings, and it works great. I'm running the server itself in a Docker container, with connections proxied through Nginx (also in a Docker container).
  - nicosomb 10y ago
    Hey dangoldin, Don't hesitate to ping us on gitter.im/wallabag/wallabag if you still have any problems.
- nicosomb 10y ago
  Thank you (I'm in the wallabag core team). About "the Pocket extension injects code into certain sites", can you give me more details please?
haraball 10y ago
What do you prefer with Pocket? I've been an Instapaper user more or less since it launched. I have tried other services (like Pocket), but I've found their parsers inferior to Instapaper. Instapaper also seems to have focused more on the experience of reading, more than "supporting all kind of content". With the Instapaper plugin in Chrome it's quick to add articles to the reading list from twitter/HN/any page. Two things on my wish list: - Let me download my full history from their API and not just the last 500 articles - Let me sort the reading list in their app on "last opened"
avian 10y ago
I'm using Instapaper exclusively due to their "download to .mobi" functionality. I'm using it to collect longer texts (through a bookmarklet in my browser) that I can then later read off-line on my Kindle.
- nicosomb 10y ago
  > I'm using Instapaper exclusively due to their "download to .mobi" functionality Like wallabag does. And you can also export into pdf, csv, txt, epub, json, xml.
abrowne 10y ago
I used it a lot, both for the list and just the Readability-like feature until browsers added their own reading mode/reading list functionality. (First proposed by Mozilla, first implemented in Safari — like the download widget ;-) — and now also in Edge.) (Only Chrome is lacking, but I'm not too surprised an ad company doesn't add it to their browser.) Now I use Firefox's reader mode and synced bookmarks.
anotherevan 10y ago
I use Pocket for the sole reason that there is an interface on my ereader to sync pocket articles. (Kobo Aura HD) If there was the same for Instapaper I would jump. I find it generally does a much better parsing job. Pocket occasionally completely borks on an article and will just redirect you to the original. Other times it often misses bullet point lists (probably thinks they are navigation). Whenever this happens Instapaper almost always handles the same article with aplomb. Aside: Let me take the opportunity to plug a little app I wrote called Erudite[1] that can download articles from Instapaper and Pocket, convert them to an appropriate format such as EPUB or MOBI, and add them to your Calibre ebook library. It is a command-line driven tool. [1] http://evanmclean.com/software/erudite/ http://evanmclean.com/software/erudite/ (Note that some of the documentation on the web-site is out of date. Doesn't mention Pocket and still mentions Readability, but the doco in the download is up to date.)
- ycombinete 10y ago
  Wow, that's actually a very neat little app. I'll be using it for sure, since I switch between a laptop, phone, a tablet, and an old 6" kindle. I found that Instapaper occasionally stripped out images when they should have been left in the article. I guess a lot of it comes down to how consistently the pages themselves are coded.

joekrill 10y ago

I recently switched from Pocket to a self-hosted instance of Wallabag (https://wallabag.org https://wallabag.org) and I've been very happy with it. One thing I've noticed with these types of services is that they quickly start becoming intrusive and annoying. Ads are the obvious annoyance. But as an additional example, the Pocket extension injects code into certain sites (HackerNews being one) so that I can "more easily" "pocket" posted articles directly from the listing page itself. And in fairness it can be disabled, but it's enabled by default. And with things like this, I just find that simpler is better. I don't need all these extra features being pushed and modifying my browsing experience "by default".

dangoldin 10y ago
I had some issues getting the Wallabag app working on a smartphone. Have you used that successfully?
- joekrill 10y ago
  I've had no problems at all. I use it primarily on my Android tablet (Nvidia Shield K1), and occasionally on my phone (also Android, Moto X Pure 2015). I haven't noticed any problems. I use it for both reading and adding using the built-in sharing functionality in Android. For setup I simply set my URL, username, and password in the settings and used the "Autofill" option to handle populating the rest of the settings, and it works great. I'm running the server itself in a Docker container, with connections proxied through Nginx (also in a Docker container).
- nicosomb 10y ago
  Hey dangoldin, Don't hesitate to ping us on gitter.im/wallabag/wallabag if you still have any problems.
nicosomb 10y ago
Thank you (I'm in the wallabag core team). About "the Pocket extension injects code into certain sites", can you give me more details please?

haraball 10y ago

What do you prefer with Pocket? I've been an Instapaper user more or less since it launched. I have tried other services (like Pocket), but I've found their parsers inferior to Instapaper. Instapaper also seems to have focused more on the experience of reading, more than "supporting all kind of content". With the Instapaper plugin in Chrome it's quick to add articles to the reading list from twitter/HN/any page. Two things on my wish list: - Let me download my full history from their API and not just the last 500 articles - Let me sort the reading list in their app on "last opened"

avian 10y ago

I'm using Instapaper exclusively due to their "download to .mobi" functionality. I'm using it to collect longer texts (through a bookmarklet in my browser) that I can then later read off-line on my Kindle.

nicosomb 10y ago
> I'm using Instapaper exclusively due to their "download to .mobi" functionality Like wallabag does. And you can also export into pdf, csv, txt, epub, json, xml.

abrowne 10y ago

I used it a lot, both for the list and just the Readability-like feature until browsers added their own reading mode/reading list functionality. (First proposed by Mozilla, first implemented in Safari — like the download widget ;-) — and now also in Edge.) (Only Chrome is lacking, but I'm not too surprised an ad company doesn't add it to their browser.) Now I use Firefox's reader mode and synced bookmarks.

anotherevan 10y ago

I use Pocket for the sole reason that there is an interface on my ereader to sync pocket articles. (Kobo Aura HD) If there was the same for Instapaper I would jump. I find it generally does a much better parsing job. Pocket occasionally completely borks on an article and will just redirect you to the original. Other times it often misses bullet point lists (probably thinks they are navigation). Whenever this happens Instapaper almost always handles the same article with aplomb. Aside: Let me take the opportunity to plug a little app I wrote called Erudite[1] that can download articles from Instapaper and Pocket, convert them to an appropriate format such as EPUB or MOBI, and add them to your Calibre ebook library. It is a command-line driven tool. [1] http://evanmclean.com/software/erudite/ http://evanmclean.com/software/erudite/ (Note that some of the documentation on the web-site is out of date. Doesn't mention Pocket and still mentions Readability, but the doco in the download is up to date.)

ycombinete 10y ago
Wow, that's actually a very neat little app. I'll be using it for sure, since I switch between a laptop, phone, a tablet, and an old 6" kindle. I found that Instapaper occasionally stripped out images when they should have been left in the article. I guess a lot of it comes down to how consistently the pages themselves are coded.