Sending from FeedDemon to Instapaper
Edit 2/4/10: And of course the day I finally got around to writing this post, FeedDemon adds this feature natively as of 3.1.0.12! No need for my hack anymore.
I’ve recently grown to love having thick clients for some of my favorite web apps. Maybe it’s because I’m a developer, but I enjoy the robustness, speed, and sometimes the extra features added by thick clients as opposed to their web brethren. I’m still not sure if HTML5 is going to change that perception for me, but I guess we’ll see.
In any case, I’ve been using FeedDemon for about a week now, to sync with my Google Reader account. With the exception of how it marks items as read, I really like it. The biggest disadvantage for me is extra-long posts. Typically, when using the Google Reader interface, I would send long posts to Instapaper to read later. Unfortunately, FeedDemon doesn’t have Instapaper support.
FeedDemon does have support for sending 3rd party blog posts to your own blog, though. It also allows you to specify your blog’s input however you want. So effectively, you can consider Instapaper your “blog” and just send articles to it. Fantastic!
A quick look at the Instapaper API shows how wonderfully RESTful it is, which makes things very easy for us. So let’s do this step-by-step. I should note that you need to be logged into Instapaper in whatever your default browser is before you can make this work.
First, we have to make sure that the “Send To” icon is visible for all blog posts, so make sure that it is checked (do this from the Options menu, get there by hitting F8 in FeedDemon).
Next, you’ll want to find a random blog post and hit the “Send To” arrow button, and go to “Configure Blog Publishing Tools…”
Finally you’ll create a new publishing tool (I named mine “Instapaper” for obvious reasons). Under the “Command line or URL” field you will want to enter the following text:
https://www.instapaper.com/api/add?username=your-instapaper-username&password=your-instapaper-password&url=$ITEM_LINK$&title=$ITEM_TITLE$
And voila, you’re done. And if you do it this way, and make Instapaper your default blogging tool, you even get a hotkey. So no more using the mouse to send RSS items into Instapaper!
The only nagging annoyance here is that every time you add something, you’ll get a new tab in your browser with nothing but “201” in it (if it doesn’t say “201” then something has gone wrong). Just close the tabs and you are good to go.
I’m going to try inputting some JavaScript (stolen from the bookmarklet) into the URL string to see if I can make it save without leaving an open tab. We will see.
posted on February 03, 2010 ∞
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to periphery.org, a weblog that I maintain. Every time a lightbulb goes off in my head, I try to post the solution here. I also tend to post interesting quotes, links, etc.
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