
Opening the Instapaper API - dsaw
http://blog.instapaper.com/post/121774203371
======
axx
I love this! I feared that Instapaper development would stagnate after Marco
sold it. Even though he said that they will develop a lot of new features, you
know how it often times is when companies/apps get bought.

But i'm happy to see quite the contrary!

What i love about Instapaper is the fact, that it doesn't fuck around. It
tries to be one thing and one great thing only. I don't want to see tweets, i
don't want to see related articles or what other people think besides my
texts.

Instapaper comes as close to reading a ebook/book as it could get. At least
for me.

~~~
webwielder2
Instapaper actually stagnated before Macro sold it (which he will admit to).
Betaworks has been very active on it since day one.

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totalcookie
Too late. I was a long time, paying customer but moved to Pocket.

~~~
on_and_off
On Android especially, the Instapaper app is way behind the Pocket one.

Pocket mostly applies successfully the latest Android design principles. It is
not perfect, but it is a solid implementation.

Instapaper looks like it has been written by somebody discovering the support
lib along the way. Bad drawer implementation, no attention to detail. It does
not even look like the dev is using its own app, because there are some
seriously low hanging fruit that should be easy to solve (for example I can't
click on the drawer icon, only on the title for some reason).

It's hard to justify a subscription with such a weak effort and it is probably
a vicious circle where the dev doesn't have a reason to improve his app
either.

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piokoch
This surprises me a bit:

"All requests should be made via the POST method, and all parameters should be
passed in the POST request-body and not in the query-string."

So even typical GET are sent as POST (/api/1/bookmarks/list)

Is there any reason to do that?

~~~
hartror
It gets even better:

> If the response is not valid JSON, it should be interpreted as an HTTP 503
> "Service Temporarily Unavailable" error, and the request should be retried
> later.

Why not just return 503?

~~~
mrec
Maybe it does, normally. But there's always an outside chance that
everything's fine at the point you start writing a response, but goes pear-
shaped before you finish. This wording just reinforces what's probably common
sense, i.e. that there's no reason you'd see invalid JSON _other than_ a
hopefully-transient operational issue.

~~~
hartror
In what circumstances does a HTTP server/client return to a partially complete
response?

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insulanian
Nice move, but I already moved to Pocket.

~~~
johnchristopher
I am looking for something to replace pocket now that the old extension is
dead and the new sucks. The service is still great on the phone but the
firefox extension is crap:

\- slow

\- no red visual icon to signal the page is already stored

\- no access to pages from firefox (bookmark not working for french locale or
sthg)

\- and the `new' button is just an add button that you have to stare at for 5
seconds because it will lose the focus and cancel the submission if you move
to another tab.

Wallabag isn't quite ready yet :(.

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rb2k_
I still love the UI of instapaper a lot more than the one pocket has on their
iOS version.

The main reason I switched to pocket was that Instapaper doesn't seem to have
support for PDFs.

I don't need any of the "position syncing" and other stuff. I just want to be
able to download the PDF and view it offline in the same app that helps me do
this to blogposts.

------
john2x
One gripe I have with Instapaper is how it formats code blocks. It doesn't
look right at all (at least on the iPad version).

~~~
pornel
And they remove some images, so Wikipedia articles about math (with symbols as
images) don't make sense. Diagrams and illustrations are often silently gone.

I keep reporting "some text/images missing", but overall I lost faith that I
can read articles on Instapaper without missing anything.

~~~
evgen
It was the long-standing failure to handle code blocks and pull in images that
moved me from Instapaper to Pocket. Have not looked back and finally got
around to just nuking the instapaper app on my phone. After getting an early
lead on the offline article niche Instapaper just squandered any goodwill by
doing nothing to improve the product.

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aaronem
Instapaper is a lot stickier now. But the API appears to be write-only;
neither there, nor anywhere else in the documentation, do I see any way to
pull my data out of Instapaper if I should decide I no longer want to use it.

~~~
masklinn
> But the API appears to be write-only

You can list your bookmarks (= saved articles), your folders and you can even
fetch the processed-text HTML content for the bookmark, what else do you need?

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paulhallett
All the methods that need to append `add`, `delete`, `update` to the URI. Why
aren't you just using HTTP methods for this?

Why do I have to POST everything? Do you know what POST is supposed to be used
for?

~~~
masklinn
> Why do I have to POST everything?

Because it's an RPC-based API?

------
walterbell
How do you find an RSS feed of all archived Instapaper articles? This is
needed to connect Pinboard with Instapaper.

~~~
masklinn
It's provided as a `link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml"` on the
/archive page (or any other folder). Sadly less and less browsers display
these (or even indicate there's one) so you'll have to dive into the JS
console or page source to extract the URL. I don't think there's an easier way
to get at the RSS feeds.

~~~
walterbell
Thanks for that tip on RSS feeds for folders. Looks like the feed of new items
is also accessible via Settings > Download > RSS.

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than
This is perfect timing. I've had a back-burnered project waiting for a
response from the API folks.

------
_pmf_
Get users -> deactivate 3rd party access to API -> lose users -> reactivate
3rd party access

The circle of life. Wonderful.

~~~
oddevan
There was never any "official" 3rd party access to the API other than an "add
article" action. And when the API was made available, it was only to
subscribers since the main revenue stream was sales of the official app. Since
the official app is now free, that revenue stream doesn't need to be
protected, and thus the API is now available to everyone.

