A serious problem with the Internet in general and the Web in particular is that there’s just too much interesting stuff to explore and it just keeps on coming.
You know how it goes: You’re looking for something specific using, say, Google and there’s a link you just can’t help but follow or a friend sends you e-mail suggesting you check out this or that Web site and you do … and minutes (or more often, hours) later you’re still down the bottomless rat hole of distraction …
If you’re like me, your strategy for dealing with this was to scan the “interesting but not your immediate priority” stuff and bookmark it. Provided you actually saved these links in categories and, where necessary, edited the titles to better reflect the content, bookmarking provided a level of remembering what the link was about but, it must be said, not a particularly good one; it was far too slow to allow for high speed content “skimming” and too easy, even when you went to the trouble of categorizing and editing bookmarks, to forget exactly why you were interested in some content item in the first place.
I’ve tried lots of Web page capture and archiving systems and the only one that has “stuck” (in as much as I’m still using it after almost a year) is Instapaper.
To use Instapaper you need to set up an account (which is free) then install the Instapaper bookmarklet (a short program usually written in JavaScript that’s stored in the URL field of a Web browser bookmark).
The bookmarklet code includes an embedded unique API key that allows page content to be added directly to your account. Although this might sound like a security risk, someone getting hold of your bookmarklet could only add pages to your account; they would still need your account name and password to log in (Note to Instapaper: You might want to include the ability to generate a new unique bookmarklet if such a thing happens … I know; it’s pretty unlikely to be a problem but it’s a thought).
When you’re on a page that you want to keep a note of, you simply click on the bookmarklet and Instapaper saves the URL and the page text (images and other non-text content are not kept) so even if the page is removed, you can still read the verbiage. Moreover, the service does a really good job of making the saved text look good despite other page components being ignored.
When you log in to your Instapaper account you can view your unread items, look in the archive of items you’ve read (you can also unarchive them back to the read list), and any item can be “starred” and a list of starred items can be browsed.
There’s also a browse feature that displays the “editor’s picks” as well as the content most saved by all users. You can move items to folders, print them, or download them in Kindle and ePub formats. You can track your items through a custom RSS feed for your account, and download a file of your saved articles in CSV or HTML format.
Instapaper also offers really outstanding iPhone and iPad applications for browsing the content saved in your account (you can also run the bookmarklet in the Safari browser on an iPad which is really useful) and there are more than 130 iPhone and iPad apps that support sending pages directly to Instapaper using the Developer API. And the icing on the cake is that you can e-mail URLs or messages to a custom address and have the content added to your account.
The Instapaper service is free and for the real fans of the service a $1 per month subscription is available which, along with sales of the iPhone and iPad apps, the service’s only developer and sole proprietor, Marco Arment, (this is quite an achievement for just one guy!) uses to defray running and development costs.
Instapaper is one of the most useful Web services I’ve found and the fact that I’ve been using it for a year is a testament to the fact that it works beautifully, it’s stable, and it’s hugely valuable. Outstanding!
