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Mobile Safari+Instapaper tip

If you’ve ever been reading a page in Mobile Safari and wished you were reading it in Instapaper instead, this is the quickest way to back that happen: Install the javascript below as a bookmarklet in Safari. Whenever you want to add an article to Instapaper and switch to instapaper all you have to do is hit that bookmarklet up.

javascript:function%20ipNOW(){var%20d='i'+document.location;document.location=d;}ipNOW();void(0)

How does it work? A while back Instapaper added a url scheme “ihttp://…”. So that any url you open on your iOS device instantly switches you to Instapaper and adds that url (minus the ‘i’, of course) to your articles. This bookmarklet just takes the url of the webpage you’re at, prepends an ‘i’, and opens that link.

As with all bookmarklets and Mobile Safari, the clunkiest part is the install. Here’s one way to do it:

1. If you’re not reading this post in Mobile Safari, switch over to your iOS device and come back. Here’s a link back here, if that helps.

2. Bookmark this page on Mobile Safari. Go through all the steps to actually bookmark this page, only you can rename to bookmark to what you’d like your bookmarklet to be called, lets call it “ipNOW” as an example.

3. Scroll up to the javascript above, select it and copy it.

4. Go back to your bookmarks, tap the “Edit” button, and select the bookmark you created in Step 2. Tap the url field for that bookmark to edit it. Tap and hold and select all of the old tumblr url. Delete. Tap and hold and paste in the javascript.

done.

UPDATE: if you tried that javascript and it got scrambled on copy/paste in mobile safari, that was because i didn’t use the <code>tag</code> . I fixed it. Try again. SHOULD work this time.

InstapaperIt Safari extension users: if you updated to Safari 5.1 you need to re-enter Instapaper credentials in Preferences

If you updated to Safari 5.1 InstapaperIt might have stop working correctly for you.

When Safari updated to 5.1 it lost some of your extension settings. This includes your Instapaper login credentials you have to enter into InstapaperIt’s preferences.

To fix:

Go to Safari’s Preferences
Click on the Extensions tab,
Click on the InstapaperIt extension.
Re-enter your username/password.
Reload any pages currently open in Safari (so they reload the extension)

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…

The InstapaperIt extension for Chrome has been updated

Get it here.

It does require Chrome 6, which means you need to be on the beta or dev channels (a stable channel Chrome 6 should be along shortly). It requires Chrome 6 because the newer versions have expanded the extensions API to allow developers to add contextual menu items.

Which means this update for InstapaperIt now matches InstapaperIt for Safari. You can right click on a link and send it to Instapaper in the background, you can right click off a link and send the current page to Instapaper, you can click the toolbar button to do that also.

InstapaperIt update

InstapaperIt has been updated to include a toolbar button that you can click to send the current page to Instapaper. You can also now send the current page by right clicking anywhere on that page that’s not a link (otherwise you’ll send that link to Instapaper). The text of the contextual menu item will point this out “Send this Page to Instapaper” vs “Send this Link to Instapaper”.

If you don’t already have it, you can download InstapaperIt here. Otherwise, just update in Safari’s extensions preferences.

A status update on my continuing obsession with Instapaper

Since getting Instapaper for my iPod Touch, I’ve been loving the ability to add links to my instapaper just by tapping on them, rather than (on my laptop) having to follow a link to its webpage, wait for it to load, and then hit the bookmarklet to send it to IP. So back when Snow Leopard came out I made a Service, and more recently I’ve made extensions for Safari and Chrome, that lets you easily send articles to Instapaper.

The browser extensions enable three ways to send articles to Instapaper in the background:

1. Right-click on a link and InstapaperIt from the contextual menu

2. hold down the option/alt key when clicking on a link.

3. click the toolbar button to add the current page to instapaper.

InstapaperIt for Safari

InstapaperIt for Chrome

OS X Service:

Once installed, you can select any URL in any cocoa application, and any link in Safari and send it to Instapaper in the background. You’ll get notified via Growl or the OS. After unzipping this, you install the service by moving it to ~/Library/Services (make a Services folder in your Library if you don’t have one).

For NetNewsWire users (adds the ability to send links in NNW as well as other apps):
InstapaperIt.zip

For Everyone else:
InstapaperIt.zip

Safari Extensions

Instapaper Greystyled and Instapaper Article Tools extensions for Safari 5. It’s a quick implementation, but Apple’s made it pretty easy to turn a userscript into a Safari extension. (How cool is that?). More on the way. More integration into Safari’s UI, perhaps.

If you don’t already know them, they’re userscripts I’ve written. Instapaper Greystyled restyles Instapaper.com to look like this:

and this

Instapaper Article Tools adds a subtle, floating toolbar next to the text articles on the website, so that while reading you can quickly navigate back, archive, star or delete an article, edit the text properties of the article, or page up, page down, and enable auto-scroll. It looks like this:

Update July 19: Yet Another Instapaper Extension: InstapaperIt gives you two ways of sending links to Instapaper to read later. When you’re surfin’ and you see a link to an article you want Instapapered, rather than having to open that link, wait for it to load, and then hit the instapaper bookmarklet or a toolbar button:

1. You can right click on the link and you’ll see a new item in your contextual menu “InstapaperIt”. Selecting that will send the link you’re right clicking on to instapaper.

2. You can pick (in preferences) either the shift key or the alt/option key. Hold down your chosen key while clicking a link and that will get sent to Instapaper in the background.

You’ll know the link has been sent when it turns black…

Get it here

Snow Leopard Services… pt2, instapaper

Since getting Instapaper Pro for my iPod, I’ve been loving the ability to add links to my instapaper just by tapping on them, rather than (on my laptop) having to follow a link to its webpage, wait for it to load, and then hit the bookmarklet to send it to IP. So I made a service to duplicate that functionality on my Macbook. Once installed, you can select any URL in any application, and any link in Safari and send it to Instapaper in the background. You’ll get notified via Growl or the OS.

Update— Sending the first page of multipage articles to instapaper got annoying so I’ve made it so that if you’re sending an article from any of the following sites it will send the full page version of the article.: NYTimes, Slate, Salon, the New Yorker, Daily Beast, Washington Post, or Wired