
Boost your productivity with Conkeror, Instapaper and a Kindle - Loic
http://ceondo.com/ecte/2010/09/productivity-conkeror-instapaper-kindle
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lionhearted
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?

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etm117
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.

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lionhearted
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.

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phsr
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?

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Loic
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.

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phsr
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.

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Loic
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/>

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phsr
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
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
Create then iterate ;) Thats further down the road.

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philips
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=11...](http://code.google.com/p/vimperator-
labs/issues/detail?id=112)

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.

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dugmartin
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.

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mcdowall
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

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_grrr
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.

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DannoHung
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.

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xtho
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.

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jcw
I LOVE conkeror.

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protez
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.

