One of the pitfalls of being an information junkie, and especially a habitual RSS subscriber is the inevitable firehose effect, and the fact that I just don’t have enough time when I start in the morning to read through everything that’s in my unread items in FeedDemon, let alone reddit, and any number of other items I find during the day.  FeedDemon has a very nice ‘clippings’ tool that can store items for looking at later, but it’s only good for inside FeedDemon.  I can click and drag an item from FireFox into FeedDemon’s clip folder, but it’s a pain.

Marco Arment of Tumblr has built a site called Instapaper.  It has to be the simplest bookmarking site I’ve ever seen.  No tags, no design fluff, you don’t even have to enter a password to register if you don’t want to.

For an explanation of what it is, this is what Marco said:

Here’s the basic premise:

• You come across substantial news or blog articles that you want to read, but don’t have time at the moment.
• You need something to read while sitting on a bus, waiting in a line, or bored in front of a computer.

But isn’t that what del.icio.us is for?

Yes, but the thing about del.icio.us is that it wants you to describe & tag the link before you save it, and it then becomes part of your public links.  That’s not what I’m after here.  I haven’t read these items, I don’t know if I like them or not.  I might think that what’s written there is complete junk.  Why would I want to store that in my bookmarks.  What Instapaper is doing is providing a private ‘to-read’ list.  Once you click on the news item it gets put into the read pile down the bottom, or you can delete it.  Plus the bookmarklet requires no interaction, it opens for less than a second in a small window then closes itself.  . 

Instapaper gives you a simple list of unread, skipped & read items.  There’s even an RSS feed of your unread items.

You said something about FeedDemon?

As I mentioned, FeedDemon has a feature purpose built for this called the clippings folders. I can keep track of selected items, synchronised across multiple computers.   But that then means I’ve got 2 lists to keep track of.  I’m way too lazy to do that.  Fortunately I can just send things from FeedDemon to Instapaper.  There’s two ways of doing it.  Either set up a new Blog Publishing Tool with the url ‘http://www.instapaper.com/b?v=3&u=$ITEM_LINK$&t=$ITEM_TITLE$&s=$ITEM_DESCRIPTION_PLAIN$‘, or create a new xml file called instapaper.xml in the [program files]/FeedDemon/Data/SendTo/ folder containing

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<fdsendto template="http://www.instapaper.com/b?v=3&u={url}&t={title}&s={summary-plain}" service="Instapaper" />

You can drop the &s={summary-plain} parameter off the end if you don’t want it to send the text summary of the item through as the summary. 

With this I can dump any feed item into Instapaper directly & keep on reading.

I know that this can look like Yet Another Bookmarking Site, but, even if it doesn’t prove to be as handy to you, I like the fact that people are writing sites that do one thing & do it well.  The internet is overfull with bloated, ugly sites that try to do everything. It’s nice to see some simplicity every now & then.

Update: Nick Bradbury has a great post detailing how to customise the Send To menu.