Chrome + Instapaper + iPad = Personal News Paper

Wow, I’m shocked and inspired. Shocked by the inter­est in my Drop­Box post from ear­lier today. Inspired to share a work­flow I still think is cool, 3 months after imple­ment­ing. Lit­er­ally. I click on a Chrome plu­gin and think “cool” as my doc­u­ment is auto­mat­i­cally sent over to Instapa­per. But, I’m get­ting ahead of myself.

You’ll want to keep read­ing if you reg­u­larly find stuff online to read (regard­less of the for­mat) and want to read it on your iPad as you’re out and about.

Here’s what I accom­plish: Brows­ing around you find an arti­cle (news, blog-post, graphic, etc) that you’d like to read later. You know how it goes… your doing some­thing, some­thing else gets your atten­tion and you real­ize that it’s a 10 minute read — you’d like to read it later with­out a lot of fuss. Or, you’re research­ing some­thing and col­lect­ing infor­ma­tion about a topic that you want to dive in at a later time. You’re in the flow of research… which is dif­fer­ent than being in the flow of reading/absorbing. You don’t want to have to have tons of browser win­dows open, or even to read it all at your com­puter. With this work­flow, I click a but­ton in my browser and the arti­cle shows up on my iPad. I can read it in bed, on the sub­way, or in my grave (they’re going to have to pry my iPad out of my cold, dead hands!). Here’s what I use:

1. Chrome Browser
2. Send to Instapa­per Chrome exten­sion (this is a “per­fect” piece of soft­ware; it just does what it does, simply)
3. Instapa­per Pro (on the iPad; I use Pro because I wanted to pay for a piece of soft­ware that I find valu­able and it lets me keep many more arti­cles on my device)

The Send to Instapa­per exten­sion is great for two rea­sons. It doesn’t try to do too much, and it’s very obvi­ous to use and know that it’s worked. In the developer’s own words “has no pur­pose other than to repli­cate the stan­dard Instapaper-bookmarklet func­tion­al­ity with two small addi­tions: it adds a key­board short­cut, and it’s stream­lined, clean, and pretty.”

It sits politely in the URL bar. Find an arti­cle you want, just click on it, and it turns into a green check mark!

Make sure your arti­cle is show­ing the full page. Some sites, like NY Times and Reuters will pag­i­nate their arti­cles (to increase their click met­rics and show more adver­tis­ing). Usu­ally, there is a “dis­play arti­cle in one page” link, or a “print arti­cle” link which does the same (it won’t print with­out mak­ing you click again).

Instapa­per pre­serves links too… so when you are read­ing later, you can inter­act with the doc­u­ment just as you would otherwise.

Next, go to your iPad. I have Instapa­per setup to only sync on wifi, so make sure you know what you’re doing if you sync a lot of data over 3G.

Open Instapa­per and click on “sync” in the upper right hand cor­ner (next to the “Edit” but­ton). It’s the but­ton that looks like a cir­cu­lar arrow.

That’s it. You can see I’ve got a vari­ety of arti­cles in my list. You might cre­ate fold­ers for your unread arti­cles by sub­ject. I don’t. I sort them after I read them, so I can browse stuff and read what­ever catches my mood.

By the way, if you’re search­ing for arti­cles to read in Instapa­per on your com­mute, check out Lon­greads. They present arti­cles based on length, so you can pick enough read­ing for the atten­tion span to suit your mood.