from Hacker News

Ask HN: How do you keep track of articles you want to read?

by pastaking on 7/29/18, 12:45 PM with 76 comments

When I browse HN, I usually pick out a few articles I want to read from the front page, then email the links to myself to read later.

This method works out pretty well for me. I’m wondering if people have other strategies that work better?

  • by aidanfindlater on 7/29/18, 2:09 PM

    I used Instapaper (https://www.instapaper.com/), then moved to Pocket (https://getpocket.com/) to take advantage of the social features, then moved back to Instapaper for no really good reason. Pocket still looks nicer and the apps are more reliable, in my experience.

    They both allow you to save the full text of an article to read later, as well as archiving and organizing articles you've already read. They sync to phones, so most of my reading actually happens on public transit. Pocket can also sync to a Kobo ebook reader; not sure about Kindle, but I wouldn't be surprised if it worked with them, too.

  • by ajeet_dhaliwal on 7/29/18, 1:39 PM

    I open them in a new tab and come back to them when ready. This ensures I’ll actually read them relatively soon. Bookmarks would be forgotten about by me and some more involved method seems like overkill.

  • by hs86 on 7/29/18, 2:27 PM

    I use the Tabs Outliner: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabs-outliner/eggk...

    Here is a screenshot of my current HN reading list: https://i.imgur.com/KvbucE2.png

    It is similar to Tree Style Tabs for Firefox but with some key differences:

    - It sits in a separate window and shows the tree for your entire current session. Each Chrome window is a child of the root node.

    - It supports indentation via Tab or Shift-Tab and has several useful keyboard shortcuts

    - Rearranging the tabs with the mouse is very precise. Indentation can also be controlled this way.

    - It uploads the entire tree to Google Drive periodically and manually. This way I can move my tab tree between computers with a simple drag and drop.

    - It can unload tabs or entire sub-trees (the green X icon in the screenshot). This makes extensions like The Great Suspender obsolete and I can still keep my gigantic tree hierarchy without eating all my RAM.

  • by kozziollek on 7/29/18, 1:49 PM

    I use Firefox everywhere.

    When using phone, during commute to/from the job, I send links to desktop using Firefox's built in feature.

    When using desktop at the job, I read articles instantly or send them to desktop at home.

    At desktop at home I have Panorama View extension [1] to avoid tab clutter.

    I plan to install Wallabag [2] on my server to have place to categorize and store already read articles.

    [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/pl/firefox/addon/panorama-view/ [2] https://wallabag.org/

  • by yannovitch on 7/29/18, 2:01 PM

    I don't.

    I have started bookmarking 10 years ago everything I find interesting, thinking I would be able quickly to read them later, and now, 10 years later, I have 34.000 bookmarks, of which there is at least 32.000 I am still waiting to read in depth.

    But it's changing. I took some "vacations" to focus on closing this gap, and do it full time for the past days. So hopefully there will soon be "only" 1000 "to-read-soon" articles in my bookmarks ;)

  • by maheart on 7/29/18, 1:22 PM

    I use "Push to Kindle"[1] (available as both a browser extension and mobile app) to push articles to my Kindle for later reading.

    [1] http://fivefilters.org/kindle-it/

  • by anotherevan on 7/29/18, 11:12 PM

    For the most part I use Pocket because my Kobo ereader supports it. However if it supported Instapaper I would swap in an instant.

    I've found Pocket often skips bits of text, usually bullet point items which I'm assuming it things are navigation menus or something. Really annoying. Instapaper does much better with this.

    Every now and again it also finds an article it cannot extract the main content from. In that case it never ends up on my ereader, and there’s no obvious indication that there is a problem.

    For either of those cases I save with Instapaper and use Erudite[1] to convert it to an epub.

    To track my readying habits, I wrote a little PHP browser based application that interfaces with the Pocket API (and the hn.algolia.com API). Once I’ve read an article I archive it. Then when I’m back at my computer I run my app, which lists the archived articles, any related Hacker News pages, and lets me manage the articles (delete, save locally, etc.). It makes it easy for me to follow up and read the HN discussions after I’ve found the time to read the article.

    Naturally I called it Pocket Lint.

    [1] https://evanmclean.com/software/erudite/

  • by satran on 7/29/18, 1:56 PM

    I use a text file named "read". I store links as a list. When I have read them and it was worth storing I move it to a subsection called read and write notes or copy content if necessary. It looks somewhat like this:

        # To Read
    - [ ] [Ask HN: How do you keep track of articles you want to read?](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17637835)
    
    # Read
    - [x] [why children aren’t behaving and what you can do about it](https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2018/06/02/611082566/why-children-arent-behaving-and-what-you-can-do-about-it)
    This is a short interview with the author of the book “The Good News About Bad Behavior“. It’s interesting how the author talks about disciplining kids.
    The good thing about plain text is you can create any organizing method you like. If you want tags just create them :) If an article was useless I remove it. It uses basic github flavoured markdown format that I can render if I want to.

    Someday I plan to automate it using a firefox plugin.

  • by jasonkostempski on 7/29/18, 2:17 PM

    I've tried many others and always end up back at email to name+toread@domain.tld. After I read it and if I want to keep it for reference, I tag and archive it, otherwise just archive it. I'd like to move from tags to a personal knowledge database with full text search, but I haven't been sufficiently motivated to set it up.

  • by sbr464 on 7/29/18, 1:31 PM

    I favorite them, and I made an api for HN user favorites. I pull into other software.

    It’s free to use also https://github.com/reactual/hacker-news-favorites-api

  • by dredmorbius on 7/29/18, 1:20 PM

  • by Bodhisattya on 7/30/18, 10:50 AM

    Feedly (https://feedly.com) works great for me. I browse all my RSS feeds in the app and whatever seems interesting, I can tag it to read later.

  • by guybedo on 7/29/18, 6:31 PM

    I use rss feeds + a rss reader. I have a 2 step process: i read headlines and tag interesting articles as "read later". Every now and then i go through this read later list, read some of the articles, and star the ones i want to save. I use the rss reader/news aggregator Aktu (https://aktu.io),shameless plug: i built it, but Feedly (https://feedly.com/) is a good option too.

  • by jenhsun on 7/29/18, 1:40 PM

    1. Both Pinboard and Pocket as my main bookmarklet storage. They're just storage but not necessary to read them all.

    2. Instapaper and emailthis as my "to read" tools. Instapaper is very nice for article readability (better than pocket) and emailthis as article storage, or sometimes needs to send out to friends or colleagues.

    3. Zotero as main research or pdf keeper.

    4. I don't use Evernote now because I already bumped into their 100,000 limitation three years ago.

    5. Please remember to use "star" or "Love" to pin your important bookmarks. It'll help someday.

  • by TruffleLabs on 7/29/18, 3:14 PM

    I use Feedly for reading selected sites, it allows for tagging articles to organize for later reading. * https://feedly.com/

    Pearltrees I use to organize things I find outside of Feedly. * https://www.pearltrees.com/

    Both have apps and Pearltrees has a Chrome plugin.

  • by pasbesoin on 7/29/18, 7:39 PM

    I used the Firefox extension "Scrapbook", until the switch to web extensions killed support for it.

    It was quick. And it saved a local copy; no worry about stuff "going away". I might get back to it sooner, or I might a considerable time later. Regardless, it would be there.

    Things like this differentiated Firefox and promoted much support of it from its user base.

    In short, it's my god-damned client/user-agent, and it should do what I want.

    (And I thank all the developers who helped enable that. It is, was their creation.)

    I welcome progress. But, taking away useful features like this, does not feel like progress.

    P.S. Yes, my thanks and all that, don't really suffice.

    However all the credit and blame shakes out, we've got a composite medium that seems, in important aspects, to be becoming more transitory. Things disappear. It's harder to "keep up with the flow". Noise and rank-gaming and all.

    And (thinking of another recent round of comments on Google search results), I guess search isn't "sexy" anymore. Not for Web content, at least.

  • by fcarraldo on 7/29/18, 2:27 PM

    It depends. For a lot of content on HN, I simply save to Pinboard with a tag. Most of that never gets read, but when I happen to need to work on something that uses, say, a graph database, I’ll review my “database” tag bookmarks to see if there’s anything useful there.

    If I actually intend to read the content of the link and not just potentially return to it later if needed, I’ll save to Instapaper, which is configured to automatically create a Kindle-formatted digest of all the links and send it directly to my Kindle on Friday mornings. It’s like a mini-magazine of only articles I care about.

    Some other commenters have suggested other “Send to Kindle” options, but I prefer this because those create a single Kindle item per article, while Instapaper’s digests compile a whole weeks worth (or more, the length of time is configurable) of content into a single Kindle “book”.

  • by sametmax on 7/29/18, 1:43 PM

    Books : amazon wishlist Internet content : bookmark Anything else : gtd personnal archive system

    Little trick : telegram has a "saved messages" chat where you can write messages, including photos, audio and video. It works offline, automatically synchronize when you get online with all telegram instances.

    You can put a direct shorcut to it on your android home screen, meaning you have a synchronized multimedia in-basket system between all your devices. I just dump all my random thougths or todo in it to sort it out the next morning.

    So somebody talk about something i might wanna read ? I just take 2s to dumo it into the chat and forget about it. Later, i review it, assess if i really want to read it, and if yes, i put it in the proper list.

  • by jabl on 7/29/18, 2:17 PM

    I open them in a separate tab, then occasionally think about reading some of my tabs when I have time in the future. Then occasionally my browser crashes such that it loses the open tabs, thus cleaning up. And thus I start anew.

  • by StavrosK on 7/29/18, 2:30 PM

    I like Linkpack: https://www.linkpack.io/

    It syncs to Dropbox, so I own my data, it's a nice interface over that.

  • by furo on 7/29/18, 1:37 PM

    I use Safari as my daily browser so I end up just using the Reading List feature. It works well, but if you want more options like tagging/categorizing then it's a no go.

  • by cncrnd on 7/29/18, 1:30 PM

    Bookmarks bar folder on chrome.

    Don't see the need for a specialized app, which I would enthusiastically install and then never touch again.

  • by fturco on 7/29/18, 2:37 PM

    I use Org Mode so I have a plain text file called todo-bookmarks.org with a list of links to the articles I want to read.

  • by sbjs on 7/29/18, 2:12 PM

    I read what I have time for at the moment and that’s it. I accept that I won’t ever be able to read or even do all the things I want in life and just take it moment by moment. If something seems important than I use my built in memory to remember it later. If it’s very important then I make time for it now.

  • by gmuslera on 7/29/18, 1:45 PM

    Newsblur. You put the HN RSS in its feeds, and you have a folder for saving stories and/or tagging them.

  • by mpetrovich on 7/29/18, 4:56 PM

    I add articles to Instapaper using the Chrome and iOS extensions. Then in Instapaper I highlight key phrases/takeaways which get automatically added (via IFTTT) to a new Evernote note for each article. I periodically review these notes to reinforce the takeaways (ie. spaced repetition).

  • by aytekin on 7/29/18, 1:21 PM

    I use Instapaper but I have also recently started trying out Pocket. These tools are effective since it is very easy to set a bookmark let to save articles for later.

    One great thing about them is that they allow you read articles offline and without ads and in the format you want such as black background.

  • by slaymaker1907 on 7/29/18, 3:50 PM

    I like to use tiddlywiki to keep track of stuff like that. It is super flexible and it is easily self hostable. Therefore, I don't have to worry about some startup going out of business but I still have the benefits of advanced features like tagging, full text search, etc.

  • by loco5niner on 7/30/18, 9:21 PM

    I pin the tab in Chrome, then move most (when eventually not read) to a bookmark folder called 'Tsundoko', never to be seen again.

    This means the most important ones are read, and the ones that don't matter are no longer taking up my "background" attention.

  • by crazygringo on 7/29/18, 2:27 PM

    Google Keep browser extension.

    I store my "jotted notes" of all kinds in Keep, and one of my labels is "toread", while the one for videos is "towatch". Keep works for me since it's cloud-based, free, and works across iOS and Android.

  • by galfarragem on 7/29/18, 2:20 PM

    I use a simple TXT file formatted as YAML that is a part of my organization system: https://github.com/galfarragem/superfolder

  • by brudgers on 7/29/18, 12:51 PM

    The |favorite| link on each story is one way. The advantage, it is integrated to HN.

  • by Jallam on 7/29/18, 1:35 PM

    I have a bookmark folder and within that folder i have multiple folders “philosophy”, “politics”, etc. Moreover, i have Evernote i created a a note book called “Inbox” where random articles are saved in to read later.

  • by CaptainJustin on 7/29/18, 3:15 PM

    I use Snooze (a Chrome extension). Some articles I'll snooze for when I get home from work. Other articles I snooze until the Saturday.

    If you haven't heard of Snooze, be sure to give it a try [1].

    [1] No affiliation to the Snooze extension.

  • by Djvacto on 7/29/18, 1:21 PM

    I use the favorite link, as mentioned in the other comment, but I also use Pocket, and its chrome extension. I have the app on my phone, and my e-reader downloads my pocket saves for me to read offline.

  • by mezzode on 7/29/18, 1:53 PM

    I get most of my articles by Feedly and save them there if they are short or time relevant like news, but I use Pocket for any articles which are longer and more in-depth.

  • by rainbowmverse on 7/29/18, 2:09 PM

    I save anything that looks interesting in Pocket and sort it out later. My to-read list never gets bigger than 10 articles. Other people seem to struggle with this.

  • by true_religion on 7/29/18, 2:08 PM

    I bookmark them into a folder named "Reading List". If after two weeks, I haven't read it, then I reconsider if it needs to be kept.

  • by artfors on 7/29/18, 3:21 PM

    I use a own instans of wallabag(wallabag.org)

  • by st380752143 on 7/29/18, 11:54 PM

    I like to save the page as .mhtml file by Chrome, and I can read it later offline or even the author delete the article.

  • by yapbreak on 7/30/18, 6:17 AM

    As an open source alternative to poket, you can use wallabag. Or you can store url through shaarli too...

  • by Flenser on 7/29/18, 8:58 PM

    I'be been favouriting them since the feature was added.

    ...

    I confess though that I haven't actually gone back and read any yet.

  • by sigacts on 7/29/18, 2:47 PM

    The Google Keep Chrome extension is a handy way to save articles that I want to read later.

  • by ishanjain28 on 7/30/18, 7:57 PM

    I forward the link to the "Saved Messages" chat on Telegram. Nifty Feature.

  • by vjsc on 7/29/18, 2:10 PM

    You just add them to your favorites ... Remove them later if you dont like them ..

  • by eyeball on 7/29/18, 2:23 PM

    New tabs in browser, and the "onetab" add-in to keep lists of links.

  • by bobbydreamer on 7/29/18, 6:24 PM

    I use a app which I have written especially for this stash.bobbydreamer.com

  • by tarun_anand on 7/29/18, 1:24 PM

    Yup...this is how I do it too actually for all sites

  • by ap3 on 7/29/18, 6:23 PM

    Instapaper or newsblur save

  • by rasz on 7/29/18, 4:33 PM

    thats what browser tabs are for, open 10-100 and read thru the day

  • by guilhas on 7/29/18, 2:36 PM

    F-Droid, Bulkshare

  • by Yoric on 7/29/18, 1:27 PM

    I use Pocket.

  • by ratsimihah on 7/29/18, 2:11 PM

    raindrop.io

  • by habi on 7/29/18, 1:20 PM

    Instapaper!

  • by gorbachev on 7/29/18, 3:02 PM

    Pocket

  • by dudefromschool on 7/29/18, 9:07 PM

    Feedly is awesome in terms of keep track of sources, and saving article for general "Read Later" as well as specific tags (can add multiple to any article). Highly recommend for gerneral content aggregation / sorting.