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Instapaper joins the Borg -- alternatives?
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Posted by bigspud
Aug 26, 2016 at 07:00 AM
yeah, if only octopusnote was a plugin to devonthink!
And notion.so is pretty nice place to write.
devonthink is getting the hard work from me.
Posted by Paul Korm
Feb 12, 2017 at 11:32 AM
So, being owned by a Pinterest doesn’t equate to being a more stable product. Apparently, Instapaper didn’t notice it was running out of space for its database hosted on Amazon Web Services—something a DBA with a couple days experience in the job would have done reflexively—and the service crashed with a total data loss. The 31 hour outage on February 8 and 9 lead to an extended period of user data being offline, with full restoration delayed to at least February 17.
The good news is, for free you get nothing.
I’d suspect most of use are more adept at backing up and managing our own data than it seems the Pinterest / Instapaper crew is.
Posted by shatteredmindofbob
Feb 15, 2017 at 09:14 AM
Paul Korm wrote:
So, being owned by a Pinterest doesn’t equate to being a more stable
>product. Apparently, Instapaper didn’t notice it was running out of
>space for its database hosted on Amazon Web Services—something a DBA
>with a couple days experience in the job would have done reflexively—
>and the service crashed with a total data loss. The 31 hour outage on
>February 8 and 9 lead to an extended period of user data being offline,
>with full restoration delayed to at least February 17.
>
>The good news is, for free you get nothing.
>
>I’d suspect most of use are more adept at backing up and managing our
>own data than it seems the Pinterest / Instapaper crew is.
Apparently it’s back up. This should serve as a good reminder of the importance of having control of your own data.
...and I need to take my own advice and get my stuff out of there now that it’s back.
I was going to add that I need to quit being lazy and set up my own Wallabag instance, but discovered that the group behind it have actually set up a paid service: https://www.wallabag.it/en
It seems until March 1st, it’s $10 per year. Very reasonable, if you ask me.
I played with it a bit. It’s not as pretty as Instapaper and is missing a few features (sort by reading time is noticeably abscent). BUT, it does have a bunch of export options!
Posted by shatteredmindofbob
Feb 26, 2017 at 04:23 AM
So, I signed up for a free trial of Wallabag.it to put it through its paces with a serious intent to sign up.
The first thing I want to mention is the price. Ten dollars is significantly less than renting a VPS to run your own installation of Wallabag, never mind whatever Instapaper Pro used to cost when it existed.
It has a nice web interface that works as it should, though I do wish there was a “Sort by Reading Time” option. You can filter articles by indicating what length you’re looking for, but no one-button option like Instapaper.
There’s an annotation function, but it does not provide any easy way to access those annotations, nor does there seem to be any way to export them. That said, while Instapaper does provide a nice interface for looking at your annotations, I don’t see any way to export them there, either.
Which bring me to another plus for Wallabag: Exporting! There is so much exporting in Wallabag! EPUB, MOBI, PDF, plain text and more!
But, what about the mobile apps?
This is where we get to a major downside of Wallabag.
The Android app has the bare minimum of functionality you’d expect from a Read Later app. It will sync with Wallabag and store your articles offline. That’s about it. There are no filtering options (other than by date, I think). No support for annotations, either making them or reading them from the web app.
I can’t really comment on the iOS app, because it’s such a pain to get it working that I just didn’t bother.
I really want to like Wallabag and the web app does show a lot of promise, but unfortunately, for this class of app, the mobile experience is the most important part.
So, I don’t know what to do. Pay for and accept a sub-par experience or roll the dice with Instapaper a little longer?
Posted by shatteredmindofbob
Feb 28, 2017 at 01:44 AM
And then today, there was a major plot twist in the Read It Later app space: https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/02/27/mozilla-acquires-pocket/
I’ll take Mozilla over Pintrest any day.