Awesome Website: Instapaper

Instapaper is a sort of link depot, kind of a del.icio.us lite. It was developed by Marco Arment of Davidville, the company famous for Tumblr and Senduit. The basic idea is that in the course of reading stuff on the internet, you find websites you don’t necessarily have time to read at the moment. Instapaper lets you save them for later reading. And it’s even designed to work with the iPhone, so you can read those articles on the go.

Some may ask, why not use del.icio.us? Well, del.icio.us is more of a social site, and a site for archiving links. Go through your del.icio.us history, I bet you’ll find in the archives, upwards of 75% dead links. That’s what I got. Instapaper marks links as read when you visit them, and lets you easily delete something you’ve read.

Others might ask, why not use your browser’s bookmarks? Well, I’m a man who doesn’t like clutter. In fact, my bookmarks consist of what’s in my bookmarks bar, for sites I access frequently and thus want to get to with a quick key command, and that’s it. Nothing in the menus. And those links are only available in that browser. Not in another browser if I happen to be using it. And not on another computer, so something I save on my MacBook isn’t available on my iMac or my iPhone, or the computer at work. So Instapaper works well for me. Granted it’s not for everyone, but it’s awesome for me.

And as an added bonus, it works well with Safari’s webclips feature. I have an Instapaper widget on my dashboard for quick glance/access to my saved for later links.

All in all, it’s a simple, no nonsense web app. To use it, all you need to put in is a user name. You can put in an email address if you want. You can set a password if you want. But you don’t have to. I like it.

© Copyright jWiltshire.org • Powered by Wordpress • Using a modified version of the Detour theme created by Brian Gardner.