How I read blogs
I have recently gotten into the habit of reading more blogs, in particular, ones featured on HackerNews.
Reading books, personally, has been a difficult habit to cultivate over time, which I mainly attribute to the periodic feelings of being “stuck” or bored on a certain set of books. Blogs, however, offer a condensed read making them efficient and often amusing sources of information.
My typical sourcing routine would usually just consist of scrolling
through HackerNews, potentially seeing something that peaked my interest
and reading it, or realizing I didn’t have the time and putting the url
off in a .txt
file somewhere.
Realizing the severe lack of efficiency present in this routine, I thought about how to make it better. First, by asking the question: what were the things I didn’t like?
- Having to scroll through articles myself
- Reading on mobile or desktop
- Having no effortless
like
orarchive
feature
To address these problems I chose to try out Instapaper
and build
a simple tool called hackerpaper
.
Instapaper has a feature that let’s you send articles to your Kindle,
which makes reading blogs much more comfortable. Moreover, the built in
like
and archive
features carryover to the
Kindle as well, making it a seamless process of read
->
archive or like
-> repeat
.
To solve the issue of having to scroll through articles myself and
add them to Instapaper, as mentioned above, I built
hackerpaper
. This tool sends HackerNews articles to
Instapaper with certain filters such as type, subdomains or a specific
article id.
I run a cron job
that sends the articles to Instapaper
at 5:00AM and have Instapaper send those articles to my Kindle at
7:00AM.
The script is as simple as:
$ ~/path/to/python3 ~/path/to/hackerpaper -a <email> <password> -t topstories
To recap the routine:
- Have
hackerpaper
send articles to Instapaper - Have
Instapaper
send those articles to Kindle - Read and archive those articles
- Repeat
I'm Liam.
I am compsci undergrad with a minor in mathematics @ mcgill university, rust enjoyer and (neo)vim enthusiast. For fun I enjoy working on open-source projects, reading, and lifting weights.
Send me a message by email: liam [at] scalzulli.com or matrix: worse:matrix.org