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by pixelmonkey 3056 days ago
I sometimes describe Instapaper as "/dev/null for web content". I reflexively share to Instapaper not to read it later, but to absolve guilt for not reading it at all. It is one of my weirdest web habits, on reflection.

OTOH, back when del.icio.us was good, I used it for roughly the same purpose.

6 comments

To me, this effect is only prevented by the fact that I get the articles emailed to my Kindle. If I was just marking something to "read later", and expecting to read it later on my computer's web browser, it would never happen.

But instead it shows up on my Kindle. I'm in a completely different mode when reading my Kindle than I'm in when on the computer. I'm calmer, slower, and I'll actually sit down and read the articles.

Yeah, the win for me is it goes to my iPad and I catch up with longer articles when I travel in particular.

That said I also use Pinboard.in. I don’t go back to read everything but I find it a useful research tool for when I remember saving something but not exactly what it was.

I have the same use case as well, pinboard is to save mostly obscure websites and blog posts and comments i found interesting but not necessarily useful
i have something like 600+ articles to read in pocket since I started using it 8 years ago. I've tried to go through and delete some of them a few times but i never make a dent since i do sort of want to read most of them.

the only thing that helped the last few years was to uninstall the browser extension. it means i have to log in to the website if I want to add something and I only go through all that hassle if i 'really' want to read it later

im thinking i might set up wallabag soon and jailbreak my kindle because I think I might have a better chance of reading them there

Have you seen p2k.co? It sends Pocket articles to Kindle using Amazon's free email-to-kindle service.
This is I think about 60% of the value I get out of Pinboard; most of what it does for me is clear tabs.

But I pay for an archive account and it does full-text search, so the other huge benefit is that when what my tabs are full of is PDF ePrint papers, I can search later for things and get results for research questions faster than I can from Google.

Agreed. I'd love to have an extension that searches my Pinboard prior to going to a search engine.
Text is small. I’d love a browser extension that archives and indexes every single price of text I come across on the internet; and lets me search them.
Falcon sound like what you're looking for: https://github.com/lengstrom/falcon
Neat, is there something like this for FF as well?
Not that I know of sadly. There's an open issue, but no progress as far as I could see. I haven't tried, but technically Firefox should support the WebExtensions APIs that Chrome uses, so it might be worth trying to manually load in the Chrome extension into Firefox.
Theres a few extensions that use the omnibar but i havent found them all that useful.

I wish pinboard had an option like evernote to display your pinned results next to google search results

Heh, Douglas Adams wrote in 1987 "The Electric Monk was a labour-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself..."
I was using delicious for the same reason but there was one aspect of it which I have never able.to found anywhere. I used to go to delicious periodically and check out what the people I follow saving as their bookmarks. I learned so much from doing that. Pinboard has never gave the same taste, it is practically automated archiving tool for me along with Pocket.
That was a killer feature for discovering people with similar interests and it worked best for niche / specialist content, where only a few others had also "saved" it. I've found https://refind.com to be a partial substitute but not entirely. It would be hard to imagine committing the time and attention I did to delicious to any other 3rd party service again
> /dev/null for web content

This is a surprisingly apt comparison, and is probably why I stopped using it a while back.

I saw somebody who had a bookmarklet to pretend to add things to Instapaper just to get the feeling you’re taking about.