All you have to do is drag that little Read Later button to your bookmarks bar in your browser and you’re set. If your browser happens to sync with your mobile browser you’re ahead of the game - because now you can easily save stuff for later across all your devices. This is simply the simplest, fastest way to use Instapaper on a daily basis. Once you’ve established an account you’ll want to immediately add the bookmarklet to your browser bar. That’s the bookmarklet, and you’re going to love it. However, all of this is a bit much to add stuff, isn’t it? Under the large Add button there’s a little Read Later button. Really all you need is the URL, because a lot of brains are baked into Instapaper, and the easiest thing to do is let it read the title/description of a page. Using the Add button in your queue, you can paste in a link, name it and add a little description if you like. Click that link - because that’s where we begin. When you setup your mobile devices or apps which support the service you’ll need this! Once you’ve set up your account, you’ll see an empty queue and a link to “+Add” some stuff to your queue. To get started, I recommend going to the website and signing up, and if you happen to have a password keeper, make sure to save your login info and sync it on your mobile devices. Yes, the iOS and Android apps cost a small amount, but I think the convenience is well worth it. The service is free to try, and for a measly $1 a month subscription you unlock some power user tools. But I can tell you Instapaper could be a handy solution for group collaboration and research as well. “Well, I read things immediately, that’s how I plow through work every day,” you might say. Using Instapaper, the basicsįirst of all, you may have read what Instapaper does and immediately dismissed it. Having been around a while, and being developed by one of the more eloquent coders out there, Instapaper has plenty of hooks for devs to use in their custom apps. Instapaper’s API is stellar, let’s just leave it at that. It is worth noting that a robust API makes for a better service overall, because developers can use it to craft app that do things but touch Instapaper’s functionality (that is, saving stuff for later digestion). I won’t be covering the business side, and I won’t be discussing the API ( opened up fully last year), which is fully documented here. In this deep dive I’ll go through how to set up Instapaper, how to integrate it into your workflow, how to configure and maximize Instapaper’s vast feature set and powerful hooks into other apps, and I’ll share some handy tips even longtime users may not be familiar with. Even if you only find shorter reads that you can’t get to until after work, Instapaper is a hugely effective tool for saving later and reading with ease. Marco Arment, the creator of Instapaper, subtly hints at the long form angle throughout the Instapaper website, although it is most powerfully reflected in a curated portion of Instapaper, which we’ll get to in a bit. If you’re looking for productivity reasons on why to use Instapaper, consider the points in this article. Guess what? Pinboard integrates with Instapaper - but we’ll discuss this later. If you’re looking for a tool to save bookmarks of websites for later perusal, you’ll want something like Pinboard. Note that Instapaper is for reading specific articles. Instapaper is, in fact, ideally suited to longer reads on the web, and that’s by design. No, not cute cat videos, more like cute Gore Vidal pieces in Esquire. If you work on the web during the day (even for a few hours) you’ll inevitably run into items you’d like to read, but can’t get to at that moment. It will also make mobile-friendly views of articles on your mobile devices, removing distractions like ads and speeding up page load times tremendously. Instapaper is designed to be a tool for saving long reads for later, when you have time to read them. So what is Instapaper? You could just ask easily ask what it isn’t, because it’s hard to explain to some people. Later this week I’ll directly compare Instapaper to its rivals, Pocket and Readability. Back then, I’d scour the web looking for stories to write up, and save them to Instapaper instead of Delicious because I didn’t need to keep them forever, just until I wrote up whatever piqued my interest at that moment. Turns out I started using Instapaper back in 2008, when the service was quite young and you didn’t have nearly the options you do today. It’s easy to take simple, powerful tools for granted.
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