Improving your digital lifestyle with Pinboard and Instapaper

We come across interesting articles throughout the day.

Sometimes we skim and let them go.

Other times, we read the entire article (when waiting).

Most often, we shelve the article to a ‘Read Later’ service so that we can get back to it when we get time.

With multiple social networks and increased information flow/sharing I find myself curating content for later consumption.

The article could be so good like 'Help! My SaaS isn't growing' from Amy Hoy that it deserves to be bookmarked for future reference.

I love experimenting with different tools that help me work better. I recently switched to the Apple ecosystem but it hasn’t worked the way I wanted it to. I used to store my read later articles on Reading List (Safari) and bookmarks on Safari. Both would sync with the iCloud. Reading List works well with a few articles. The syncing between iDevices was a bit buggy and it doesn’t have any support from third-party apps like Flipboard, Feedly etc. Apple ought to open up their Reading List API so that Twitter, Feedly, Flipboard etc. can push articles there. Safari bookmarks are crap because you can’t tag or search them. This model is not scalable aS your bookmarks grow.

Yesterday, I came across Shawn Blanc’s post on Pinboard and this process got me to signup on Pinboard and Instapaper. One of my dev guys uses Pinboard so I knew it was not some flaky, new web service. Pinboard cost me $10.21.

Over a pint of beer, I moved my Reading List to Instapaper and Safari Bookmarks to Pinboard.

This is what my new flow looks like:

Instapaper becomes my reading medium for everything. Everything that I consume and I need to read later goes into Instapaper. An article sent by a friend gets forwarded via email to Instapaper. Twitter, Feedly, a Flipboard and most apps have an integration with Instapaper so if I find something worth reading (like the fall of Blackberry) then it goes into Instapaper.

I have also setup an ifttt recipe to send anything I favourite on Twitter to Instapaper.

When I want to catch up on my reading I simply open up Instapaper. That is it. Just this one web service available on my all my devices.

Instapaper is my filter to see what ultimately passes through to Pinboard.

Pinboard becomes a place to bookmark links that I would like to reference in the future. For example, the Shawn Blanc link was bookmarked in Pinboard (tagged as ‘Pinboard’) and it took me just a few seconds to find, copy it from there and add it to this post.

I have noticed that I will Instapaper a lot of articles but only a few are really worth reading - the others that were added in excitement (and with the fear of missing out) are simply deleted. If I like an article in Instapaper, it will automatically be sent to Pinboard.

That’s it.

What do you’ll use for Read Later and Bookmarking?
http://www.sahilparikh.com/improving-your-digital-lifestyle-with-pinboard-and/
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