Thing 10: Instapaper

The features and uses of several of these "things" are beginning to blur together, at least as I am thinking about them.  Instapaper sounds like an interesting concept.  I have often struggled what to do with sommething on the web that I want to read later.  Usually I save a link in my browser or send an email link to my personal email account, expecting to have more time at home.  This works reasonably well.  The advantage of Instapaper is that it would be accessible from any browser, and I would not have extra email messages cluttering up my inbox.  However, the way I envision using this service is very similar to how I would see using Diigo - that, too, is a service for saving and organizing websites to be used/view later.  I suppose Diigo has the added "social" element of allowing one to share lists, but as I pointed out in my post on the topic, I can't see any advantage to using that feature, at least in a classroom setting.

Anyway, I created an Instapaper account and I will see how it works for a while.  I have not yet tried accessing it from my Ipad but I will come back to this post and update after I have done so.  I did encounter one problem - I was unable to drag the "read later" button to the bookmarks bar in Chrome, which is my preferred browser these days.  It worked fine in Firefox.  After doing some searching I found another approach.  Chrome has an extension available called "defer".  This extension installs a button that can be linked to Instapaper as well as several similar services.  Here is where I read about how to use "defer"  It does work now with my Chrome browser.  I am interested to see how well it works at school, where I will be on a different computer but can sign in to my Google account within Chrome.

Below is a screen shot of the instructions.  Other services it works with are called "Pocket, Readability, Kippt, Pinboard and Buffer"  (I have not heard of any of these before ).

Here are a couple of items on my Instapaper account.  Still not school-related - I have travel on the brain.

UPDATE: I was able to get to my instapaper page/list from the iPAD, but I could not save additional pages to read later.  There is an App available, but at $3.99 I need to decide whether it's worth paying for.  The link did show up on my Chrome browser at school.