Ask HN: How do you keep track of articles you want to read? When I browse HN, I usually pick out a few articles I want to read from the front page, then email the links to myself to read later. This method works out pretty well for me. I’m wondering if people have other strategies that work better? |
One great thing about them is that they allow you read articles offline and without ads and in the format you want such as black background.
This means the most important ones are read, and the ones that don't matter are no longer taking up my "background" attention.
I store my "jotted notes" of all kinds in Keep, and one of my labels is "toread", while the one for videos is "towatch". Keep works for me since it's cloud-based, free, and works across iOS and Android.
I 'tree shake' them agressively to be always under ~2K lines and keep them maintainable.
If you haven't heard of Snooze, be sure to give it a try [1].
[1] No affiliation to the Snooze extension.
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I confess though that I haven't actually gone back and read any yet.
They both allow you to save the full text of an article to read later, as well as archiving and organizing articles you've already read. They sync to phones, so most of my reading actually happens on public transit. Pocket can also sync to a Kobo ebook reader; not sure about Kindle, but I wouldn't be surprised if it worked with them, too.
Plus you've got that whole cross-platform thing.
Older versions gave me the incentive to sort things out by slowing down with many tabs or taking too much memory. Now, I unfortunately just accumulate :( At the current rate, I'll likely never get down to 0, as I find more interesting things per day than I can read....
Here is a screenshot of my current HN reading list: https://i.imgur.com/KvbucE2.png
It is similar to Tree Style Tabs for Firefox but with some key differences:
- It sits in a separate window and shows the tree for your entire current session. Each Chrome window is a child of the root node.
- It supports indentation via Tab or Shift-Tab and has several useful keyboard shortcuts
- Rearranging the tabs with the mouse is very precise. Indentation can also be controlled this way.
- It uploads the entire tree to Google Drive periodically and manually. This way I can move my tab tree between computers with a simple drag and drop.
- It can unload tabs or entire sub-trees (the green X icon in the screenshot). This makes extensions like The Great Suspender obsolete and I can still keep my gigantic tree hierarchy without eating all my RAM.
That being said, I still do not regret for paying for this extension. It is still the only browser extension I ever paid for and just like back then with Tree Style Tab for Firefox this is the extension that keeps me from switching away from Chrome.
When using phone, during commute to/from the job, I send links to desktop using Firefox's built in feature.
When using desktop at the job, I read articles instantly or send them to desktop at home.
At desktop at home I have Panorama View extension [1] to avoid tab clutter.
I plan to install Wallabag [2] on my server to have place to categorize and store already read articles.
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/pl/firefox/addon/panorama-view/ [2] https://wallabag.org/
From phone to desktop? Is it possible in an iPhone?
I have started bookmarking 10 years ago everything I find interesting, thinking I would be able quickly to read them later, and now, 10 years later, I have 34.000 bookmarks, of which there is at least 32.000 I am still waiting to read in depth.
But it's changing. I took some "vacations" to focus on closing this gap, and do it full time for the past days. So hopefully there will soon be "only" 1000 "to-read-soon" articles in my bookmarks ;)
I've found Pocket often skips bits of text, usually bullet point items which I'm assuming it things are navigation menus or something. Really annoying. Instapaper does much better with this.
Every now and again it also finds an article it cannot extract the main content from. In that case it never ends up on my ereader, and there’s no obvious indication that there is a problem.
For either of those cases I save with Instapaper and use Erudite[1] to convert it to an epub.
To track my readying habits, I wrote a little PHP browser based application that interfaces with the Pocket API (and the hn.algolia.com API). Once I’ve read an article I archive it. Then when I’m back at my computer I run my app, which lists the archived articles, any related Hacker News pages, and lets me manage the articles (delete, save locally, etc.). It makes it easy for me to follow up and read the HN discussions after I’ve found the time to read the article.
Naturally I called it Pocket Lint.
# To Read
- [ ] [Ask HN: How do you keep track of articles you want to read?](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17637835)
# Read
- [x] [why children aren’t behaving and what you can do about it](https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2018/06/02/611082566/why-children-arent-behaving-and-what-you-can-do-about-it)
This is a short interview with the author of the book “The Good News About Bad Behavior“. It’s interesting how the author talks about disciplining kids.
Someday I plan to automate it using a firefox plugin.
It’s free to use also https://github.com/reactual/hacker-news-favorites-api
https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/fj5rzi8zmouyrmvg8yzzva
Index cards. Lots of index cards.
https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/u4dgr0tkxk4tk9npuvex5a
Pocket ... gets worse the more you use it.
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/5x2sfx/pocket_...
2. Instapaper and emailthis as my "to read" tools. Instapaper is very nice for article readability (better than pocket) and emailthis as article storage, or sometimes needs to send out to friends or colleagues.
3. Zotero as main research or pdf keeper.
4. I don't use Evernote now because I already bumped into their 100,000 limitation three years ago.
5. Please remember to use "star" or "Love" to pin your important bookmarks. It'll help someday.
Pearltrees I use to organize things I find outside of Feedly. * https://www.pearltrees.com/
Both have apps and Pearltrees has a Chrome plugin.
It was quick. And it saved a local copy; no worry about stuff "going away". I might get back to it sooner, or I might a considerable time later. Regardless, it would be there.
Things like this differentiated Firefox and promoted much support of it from its user base.
In short, it's my god-damned client/user-agent, and it should do what I want.
(And I thank all the developers who helped enable that. It is, was their creation.)
I welcome progress. But, taking away useful features like this, does not feel like progress.
P.S. Yes, my thanks and all that, don't really suffice.
However all the credit and blame shakes out, we've got a composite medium that seems, in important aspects, to be becoming more transitory. Things disappear. It's harder to "keep up with the flow". Noise and rank-gaming and all.
And (thinking of another recent round of comments on Google search results), I guess search isn't "sexy" anymore. Not for Web content, at least.
If I actually intend to read the content of the link and not just potentially return to it later if needed, I’ll save to Instapaper, which is configured to automatically create a Kindle-formatted digest of all the links and send it directly to my Kindle on Friday mornings. It’s like a mini-magazine of only articles I care about.
Some other commenters have suggested other “Send to Kindle” options, but I prefer this because those create a single Kindle item per article, while Instapaper’s digests compile a whole weeks worth (or more, the length of time is configurable) of content into a single Kindle “book”.
Little trick : telegram has a "saved messages" chat where you can write messages, including photos, audio and video. It works offline, automatically synchronize when you get online with all telegram instances.
You can put a direct shorcut to it on your android home screen, meaning you have a synchronized multimedia in-basket system between all your devices. I just dump all my random thougths or todo in it to sort it out the next morning.
So somebody talk about something i might wanna read ? I just take 2s to dumo it into the chat and forget about it. Later, i review it, assess if i really want to read it, and if yes, i put it in the proper list.
It syncs to Dropbox, so I own my data, it's a nice interface over that.
Don't see the need for a specialized app, which I would enthusiastically install and then never touch again.
I am a paying customer, planning to run my own instance when I have the time, but it's been so reliable that I just can't prioritize switching to my own instance over other stuff...
I've not used it in years.
- LoadTabOnSelect: Load new tabs on selection. This addon will prevent new tabs from automatically loading, instead loading them on selection.
The intended usage of the addon is to facilitate power-users who open many tabs before viewing, but dislike auto-playing videos (and other annoyances).
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/loadtabonsele...
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- Auto Tab Discard: Use native tab discard method to automatically reduce memory usage of inactive tabs. Auto Tab Discard a lightweight extension that uses the native method (tabs.discard) to unload or suspend browser tabs to significantly reduce the memory footprint of your browser when many tabs are opened.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-disc...
edit: typos
As this is a built-in feature of Firefox, I'm curious if there are any additional benefits this addon provides?
Edit: Oh, I'm a bit slow, apparently this prevents loading a tab even on the initial click (the built-in option only prevents it on startup). Thanks, looks useful!