The Path Starts with the Browser

My path towards Instapaper began with the World Wide Web, and a browser. Just a handful of sites at first. But as the web matured, and my interests widened the sites I visited on a regular basis grew to over a hundred. Everyday I would sit down to a list of bookmarks finding out what was new in my corner of the Internet one webpage at a time. The process was tedious, but the content was free, and as a lowly college student I didn’t have the funds or the permanent address to subscribe to a truckload of magazines.

I would visit the same site day after day until new content appeared. I soon began to learn different authors published at different frequencies. Some wrote a couple articles monthly, others weekly, and a few would actually publish daily or even multiple times each day. I organized my reading list by observed frequency, and used my new found wisdom to check my list accordingly.

Along the Road to RSS

In 2002 something amazing happened. NetNewsWire was released for Mac OS X around the same time I learned about RSS. Gone were the days of checking a long list of bookmarks one after another. Web browsing was now like email. When a website I followed got updated I would get notified with a summary or the entire article in my NetNewsWire inbox. Suddenly my reading experience was no longer linear. I could read articles out of order from when they were brought to my attention. I could organize my feeds in folders and flag items for reading later just like in an email program. The content I subscribed to was delivered on my terms, read on my schedule, and presented in a stylesheet of my choosing.

But RSS could only take me so far. Often the articles I read lead to other stories on separate sites outside of my newsreader’s feeds. Separated from NetNewsWire I could no longer organize articles by folders, or flag entries for later reading. Reduced once again to following a trail of links I found myself reading articles in a string of links until the trail ran cold and I returned to the safety of my newsreader. RSS is no help at organizing the web outside of my subscription list.

Twitter: A Stop Along the Way

The advent of Twitter didn’t replace RSS and it didn’t civilize the wilds of the World Wide Web. Twitter is another source for finding articles. Instead of leading the expedition myself by picking the path or subscribing to a feed Twitter puts someone else in the driver’s seat. With Twitter I don’t necessarily subscribe to a source of work like RSS, but instead to a group of people I choose as leaders. They share what articles they think are interesting and as one of their followers I benefit from their discoveries. Of course a link has been posted I am off again into wilderness of the World Wide Web. Twitter is merely a vehicle of communication and offers few tools to organize the articles its members share.

Destination Instapaper

Instapaper is my finale reading destination. Following trails of links, sifting through RSS feeds, and browsing my Twitter stream are now just a means of finding the articles I want to read later. I almost never read from any of these sources directly anymore. Instead when I find something that interests me I click a bookmarklet in my browser, newsreader, or Twitter app and send that article to Instapaper. Instapaper collects everything I send to it, strips it of its presentation and distracting ads, and packages it as a single source I can visit from anywhere.

Using any number of the dedicated Instapaper apps I can view all of my collected articles and read them in any order I choose. If I come across an interesting outside link while I am reading there is no need to go to the browser. I can send that link directly to Instapaper for later reading without leaving my place. In fact Instapaper for iOS remembers my place no matter how I quit the app so I can always return where I left off. No more bookmarks for unread articles, no more flags for articles I want to read later. Instapaper is my one stop destination for everything I want to read.