5 ms·

Boost your productivity with Conkeror, Instapaper and a Kindle

88 points by Loic 16y ago

phsr 16y ago
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?
- Loic 16y ago
  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.
  - phsr 16y ago
    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.
    - Loic 16y ago
      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/ http://www.kindlefeeder.com/
      - phsr 16y ago
        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.
        Loic 16y ago
        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 :)
        phsr 16y ago
        Create then iterate ;) Thats further down the road.
- _grrr 16y ago
  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.
  - phsr 16y ago
    It does, but I think Instapaper randomly grabs articles from your backlog. My idea is to have some sort of priority attached to articles
    - _grrr 16y ago
      I see. Either way, reading articles from web on Kindle is definitely the way to go.
xtho 16y ago
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.
lionhearted 16y ago
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?
- etm117 16y ago
  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.
  - bojanbabic 16y ago
    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 http://instaright.appspot.com
  - lionhearted 16y ago
    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.
- 16y ago
mcdowall 16y ago
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
- _grrr 16y ago
  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.
dugmartin 16y ago
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.
jcw 16y ago
I LOVE conkeror.
- protez 16y ago
  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.
DannoHung 16y ago
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.
philips 16y ago
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=112 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.

88 points by Loic 16y ago

phsr 16y ago

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?

Loic 16y ago
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.
- phsr 16y ago
  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.
  - Loic 16y ago
    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/ http://www.kindlefeeder.com/
    - phsr 16y ago
      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.
      - Loic 16y ago
        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 :)
        phsr 16y ago
        Create then iterate ;) Thats further down the road.
_grrr 16y ago
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.
- phsr 16y ago
  It does, but I think Instapaper randomly grabs articles from your backlog. My idea is to have some sort of priority attached to articles
  - _grrr 16y ago
    I see. Either way, reading articles from web on Kindle is definitely the way to go.

xtho 16y ago

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.

lionhearted 16y ago

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?

etm117 16y ago
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.
- bojanbabic 16y ago
  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 http://instaright.appspot.com
- lionhearted 16y ago
  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.
16y ago

mcdowall 16y ago

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

_grrr 16y ago
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.

dugmartin 16y ago

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.

jcw 16y ago

I LOVE conkeror.

protez 16y ago
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.

DannoHung 16y ago

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.

philips 16y ago

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=112 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.