Tuesday, August 31, 2010

Q&A:InstapaperIt-generated Titles

Q: Would it be possible to add a preference to InstapaperIt, which gives saved articles a title generated from the linked page, rather than the text of the link? A lot of times, I use want to read articles later that are linked in-line with text like “here” and other generally bewildering captions when they’re used as titles in Instapaper. Thanks.

A: I’ll work on it. Instapaper’s API has a built-in auto-titler, which InstapaperIt does use, but not always. It is a toss-up when you compare the results of just using the link text vs using the Instapaper API’s auto-titler. Half the time one of them works better, and vice-versa. Maybe its 60-40. The Instapaper auto-titler is terrible with NYTimes links, for example. And the problem is that if I choose to use the auto-titler, I won’t know what it comes up with until its too late (the article’s already been sent).

Writing my own auto-titler is not in the scope of an extension (a client-side script), it needs a server-side element to crawl that link and then decide which to use. 

Maybe I’ll just switch back to the auto-titler and harass Marco to improve things…

Notes

  1. michaelthegeek reblogged this from elasticthreads
  2. Dov submitted this to elasticthreads