Wordius

Archive tagged Read It Later articles in Pinboard

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 09:19:00 +0000

After trialling a number of reading applications, I’ve come to the conclusion that Read It Later (now Pocket) is also the best way to Keep Articles For Later—for future reference, that is

For the past year I’ve been collecting and reading long-form articles using Instapaper, Read It Later and Readability, with my reading interests divided between the three.

Then I read a tweet by Mandy Brown that begged a question and changed everything.

aworkinglibrary I would kill to be able to browse my Instapaper archive by author or publisher. More structured data, please.

Mandy Brown, on Twitter

The call for structured data is aimed at website owners, the publishers of articles. So this solution is something of a halfway house. It requires readers to tag articles they want to keep for posterity. If you have no interest in using Read It Later or Pinboard—a bookmarking app—then you might as well stop here.

The problem

I save most articles to Instapaper to read later. When I’ve read them, I either delete them or store them in a folder on my Instapaper account. My Pinboard account is linked to Instapaper. It automatically harvests links to these articles, and adds an ‘instapaper’ tag. I can add additional tags in Pinboard if I want. But that relies upon me remembering to do so. I can’t tag articles in Instapaper’s web app, which, for me, is the natural order of things: read it, tag it, archive it.

Bear in mind that none of these reading apps claim to be archiving facilities. They are only intended for short-term storage. In fact once you have read an article, the expectation, the hope even, is that you will declutter and archive it elsewhere.

As far as web apps go, only Read It Later allows you to tag articles. As with Instapaper, Pinboard can be linked to Reader It Later to harvest article links. But connecting Pinboard, via ‘settings’, to your Read It Later account means the imported bookmarks arrive minus your carefully crafted tags, with only a ‘ril’ tag added during the transfer.

This reinforced my perception that the natural way to do things is to read it, tag it, archive it. So how to go about archiving these carefully tagged articles?

The solution

Make that ‘my solution’, because there are bound to be others.

I created a ‘task’ on the event-driven programming service IFTTT, or IF This Then That. This is not an instructional on how to use that service. It only explains how to access the task and put it to work for you. I saved my ‘task’ as a ‘recipe’ in IFTTT terminology, which means anyone who has signed up for IFTTT can use it. First, make sure you have the following in place:

One IFTTT account (free): register via the link below
One Read It Later account (free): register via the link below
One Pinboard account ($9.63 one-off fee when I last looked, but increases every time someone adds a new account): register below. For more on Pinboard, see my earlier post.

Done? Login to your IFTTT account then click the link to the Read It Later to Pinboard recipe, below. If you haven’t already, you will be asked to activate the Read It Later and Pinboard ‘channels’ in your IFTTT account. Once you’ve done that, click ‘Create task’.

Next time you mark an item as ‘read’ in Read It Later, IFTTT will run the task and transfer a private bookmark to your Pinboard account. It’s up to you whether you make bookmarks ‘public’ later.

Oh, don’t forget to add relevant tags to the article before you mark it as ‘read’.

Pinboard: social bookmarking for introverts

Sat, 28 Jan 2012 10:00:00 +0000

Think slimmer, faster Delicious without the shiny bits

Of the dozens of apps I’ve bought or signed-up for over the past 12 months, I have a feeling Pinboard is going to stick around for some time.

It works like Delicious, because it’s based on the Delicious API. It just doesn’t look like Delicious. Pinboard is reminiscent of ‘earlyweb’ pages, but with better typography. Advertising, annoying pop-ups and that ever-present pressure to feel you have to interact with others are all absent. You can interact with other users if you want to, but on your terms.

After taking the tour, I paid the $9.63 entrance fee. Yes, some of the best things in life are paid for. Within five minutes I had imported all my bookmarks from Google Chrome—most browsers and scenarios are catered for—and set about reorganising my online life.

You can also link Pinboard to up to three Twitter accounts to archive all your Tweets and your favourites. Link it to your Delicious account and Pinboard will capture any new bookmarks you add—or you can simply add links via one of Pinboard’s comprehensive set of bookmarklets. Link Pinboard to your Instapaper account (or Read It Later or Readability) for access to all your favourite articles. Enable bookmarking by email and you can send links direct.

One feature I’d like to see is the ability to mark all bookmarks as private on import. My Chrome toolbar was full of bookmarks for logins, some of which had usernames and passwords saved in my keychain for easy access. When I clicked on these after importing them, the usernames were visible. A ‘select all’ option would also be useful for marking all links filed under specific tags as private, or public depending on your needs.

The fee for Pinboard is a one-off. But there’s also an archive service—$25 per year—that allows you to save entire web pages for viewing offline. At some point in the future when a URL dies, as it surely will, if you’ve archived the web page it won’t be your loss.

Summary

Website: https://pinboard.in/
Cost: $9.63—a one-off charge that rises as more users join. Get in low
Pros: fast, clean, friendly
Cons: being able to mark all bookmarks as private on import would be useful. This feature appears to be buried in ‘settings > privacy’, so I guess the option is there if you enable it prior to importing your bookmarks from elsewhere

iA Writer for Mac: nothing to see here

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 15:34:00 +0000

An elegant, clean writing app that requires some external cosmetic work to take it to the next level

I’ve tinkered with iA Writer* for an hour. It takes less time than that to discover and use all of its features.

Read the default document that appears when you first launch iA Writer; it contains all you need to know.

Once you’ve digested its contents—in a little under two minutes—sit back and feel hard done by. You’ve just bought an app that does… well, it does very little. But therein lies the beauty of iA Writer—its simplicity.

Get down to it

Give it a go. Start writing something. Anything. You have to use an app—any app—to understand how it works. While you’re at it, use your keyboard to switch to full-screen mode (Ctrl-Command-F) . Keep writing.

Take in your new surroundings as you write. Nothing. Just you and your words. Keep writing.

A few headings in your text wouldn’t go amiss. Type hash-space-YourHeading (# YourHeading); that’s a <h1> in HTML. Need a <h2>? Type hash-hash-space-YourHeading (## YourHeading); add another hash if you need an <h3>.

While you’re doing all this, think. You haven’t once had to reach for your mouse. You can also add lists (ordered and unordered), strong (bold) text, emphasis, blockquotes, and navigate words and sentences; all without touching your mouse.

If you’re anything like me, you’ll feel at home in iA Writer instantly. My keyboard felt more responsive—probably because both hands remained rooted there, neither having to wander off to track down the mouse, launch a floating style palette, and apply some unnecessary nonsense to my text. Like Outline-Shadow-Fill-Purple. That was the Sixties, man. The Tenties are black and white, and tinted.

I like

The screen typography At first I wasn’t so sure. Every writing application I’ve ever worked in I set up with the default typeface as a serif, usually Georgia. But the clarity of the mono-spaced default face takes some beating. It grows on you. Quickly. That’s just as well, because you can’t change it.
auto Markdown Your hands don’t have to leave the keyboard. You apply the few styles available, like headings (h1, h2, h3), lists (ordered and unordered), strong (bold) and emphasis, via the keyboard. No mouse required.
The full-screen and Focus modes Both allow you to concentrate on writing. Full-screen gets rid of screen clutter to leave you alone with your writing; Focus (Command-D) dims all but the three lines in the document you’re working on.
Reading time and word count Displayed at the bottom of the window for the current document.

I’m coming to terms with

Autosave. I still hit Command-S out of habit—just in case. Initially I even selected all and copied my words to the clipboard. There’s no need.

What’s not to like?

iA Writer creates the perfect environment for writing. But translating the finished article to your blog requires the help of a middleman if you need to edit the HTML output. In my case, I export from iA Writer as an HTML document, open the HTML document in TextWrangler, and copy-and-paste the raw HTML to Tumblr or WordPress. That leaves you with two documents—one too many.

The best solution I’ve come across is nvALT 2.1’s HTML source code tab†. It enables fast copying/pasting to blogs, and you only have one document, saved in plaintext, Markdown-ready, and editable anywhere.

One last thing

The beauty of iA Writer is its simplicity. It hides the clutter, allowing you to focus on writing. That’s what you want it for, right? If you want more, look elsewhere. That said, if iA Writer hid the external clutter—multiple documents—equally as well, it would be a one-stop, streamlined workflow solution for creating blog posts offline.

A new version of iA Writer is imminent. We’ll see.

* iA Writer website

† nvALT 2.1 website

Share and share alike

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 15:34:00 +0000

In an environment where reputations and relationships thrive on sharing, such as the internet, giving credit where it’s due should be high on your list of priorities

As I write, over on Google+ Jason Calacanis is accused of breaking some unwritten rules—and possibly some written ones, too*.

Calacanis’s crime, according to his accusers, is ‘post theft’, taking posts made by others and passing them off as his own. With 100,000+ followers—and I don’t even know who he is—it makes you wonder why someone would need to do such a thing. What’s wrong with just sharing the original, or at least giving some form of credit?

It makes me wonder if his huge following on G+ is as much to do with his ‘borrowing’, as it is his achievements elsewhere.

Right here on Tumblr, I have the beginnings of a site that’s based on sharing, Arkulus†. It is all about sharing great writing on the internet with a wider audience. What it is not about is suggesting that I, nor anyone else who posts to Arkulus, wrote the articles in the first place—unless, of course, they choose to post something from their personal blog.

Arkulus takes a short extract and links back to the original work‡. Why does Arkulus do this? To spread the words, the great words. The aim is to separate the wheat from the chaff—the good posts from the not-so-good posts—and deliver a trickle of goodness, which is something an RSS reader can’t do.

I can think of a few names for people like JC, but most of them are ‘untypeable’. You can find out what others think via the ‘comments’ link, below.

* The post accusing Calacanis of wrong doing has attracted more than 500 comments.

† If you’ve read some great web articles and would like to share on Arkulus, you can find out more on the How to page.

‡ All articles are also tagged with the author’s name, among other things. When the full site is up and running, this will be more in evidence. But, in the meantime, if you think my methodology for giving credit/attribution requires fine-tuning, please say so.

ebooks need standards

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 15:33:00 +0000

With web standards pretty much front and centre, isn’t it about time developers/designers turned some of their attention towards what appears to be a pretty ‘standardless’ digital creation, the ebook?

Publishers want us to buy ebooks because they are cheap to produce compared with their analog equivalent; production costs are minimised and logistical costs, such as storage and delivery, all but disappear. In other words, publishers are very happy with the ebook format. It saves them time; it saves them money; it saves them caring.

I’ve read ebooks using a variety of e-reader-type applications: Digital Editions, Kindle for Mac/iPad, Kobo, Readmill, Stanza. Each, with the exception of ebooks delivered in PDF format, has looked like the work of a designer who would be happier laying bricks. Yet the designers in question are respected for their work, both for print and digital media.

The ebook experience should be better than the printed book experience. It should be a treat to look at, and offer the bonus features you would expect of a digital product, such as web links, highlighting, notation and electronic bookmarking. While the latter features seem to be taken care of in many cases, the visual appeal has been neglected in every case I’ve come across.

My three latest ebook buys—HTML5 for Web Designers, CSS3 for Web Designers and Adaptive Web Design—are perfect examples. When you pick up a printed book, it’s not normal to come across headings at the bottom of a page, separated from their content; nor are widows and orphans. It’s not normal to have captions divorced from their pictures. Justified, hyphenated text might be fine when the dimensions of the finished product are fixed, because the designer has greater control. But it tends not to work when the page width is flexible.

I think the solutions to some of these problems lie in InDesign’s ‘Keep options’ (open the ‘Paragraph style’ palette; double-click a style; see left panel). (There was something similar in QuarkXpress when I last used it.) And in the designer taking a common sense approach to ebook design, like switching off hyphenation and setting text ragged for ebook output.

Unlike the publisher, as a reader I am not very happy with ebook formats at the moment.

This post first appeared in my Google+ stream.

English in the EU