After reading Allen Pike’s piece “372 Easy Steps to Expanding Your Mind” on his experiences with Instapaper, the popular read it later service, I decided to finally give Instapaper a go again. It’s been a good number of years since I used it, and I was immediately presented with this lovely message:
Instapaper is temporarily unavailable for users in Europe
Great.
Luckily, I remembered I have an old Pocket account, and I used to like that, so I’ve now downloaded the app again. To be pretty honest, I don’t notice any difference to the app to when I used to use it. Maybe that’s a win for consistency, but it looks a bit outdated.
After logging in, I noticed there was still four articles that I’d saved for later. It’s a good overview of the articles I usually read. Although I must admit these are from a very long time ago:
- Meet the Man Behind ‘Solarized,’ the Most Important Color Scheme in Computer History
- The Coolest Workstations
- Still Blogging in 2017
- ‘London Bridge is down’: the secret plan for the days after the Queen’s death
I’m pretty sure this type of service, is the missing piece of my reading puzzle. I already use Twitter for “news”, and I’m a big fan of RSS feeds, so I have a lot of content already. Along with that, I can find more content on Micro.blog, which is a great place to write your own content, read others, and find interesting conversations and communities.
However, whenever I have just a single article I want to read, but just not that second, it somehow finds a way to escape me.
It’s not that I’ve been completely without a service like this, instead I’ve been ”using” Pinboard. I’m a big fan of Pinboard, with its simple appearance, great functionality, and good API (I was messing around with automation before). But I haven’t found a great app for it yet, so it doesn’t really get used that much. I tend to just send links there to die.
So I’m going to try out Pocket for a while, I hope I can get around the old design of the iOS app. Luckily for me it has a dark mode, and also a Mac app. I think I’ll be fine.