Saving webpages for later use
Instapaper
Instapaper (http://www.instapaper.com) focuses on simplicity and speed: you only need to register and drag a “bookmarklet” on to your browser’s toolbar. When you now click on the Instapaper button when visiting a site, the current page will be saved. Saved pages are stored as “articles” on the Instapaper website. These articles contain only the bare text and the main illustrations present on the webpages.
To read an article at a later time, you should surf to the Instapaper site. You can arrange your articles in folders, but you can’t search them by keyword or tag them. Moreover, the articles can’t be read offline, for instance when your Internet connection is temporarily down or when there’s no connection available for your laptop.
Offline. To be able to read them offline, you should install the (experimental) Chrome extension Chromapaper - enter this name in Chrome Web Store’s search field (https://chrome.google.com/webstore). You can also use the Instapaper app (£2.99) for your iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad. This app enables you, amongst other things, to download the articles you’ve saved so you will be able to read them offline.
Apps. Instapaper’s main asset is that it’s integrated with hundreds of other apps which have a Send to Instapaper button, and that lots of other services make use of it. For instance, InstapaperFeed (http://instapaperfeed.com) enables you to save the tweets of the people you follow as Instapaper articles. And the InstaFetch app (http://instafetch.immortal.pl/) lets you read Instapaper articles offline on Android mobile devices.
Read It Later
Read It Later (http://readitlaterlist.com) does exactly the same thing as Instapaper: it lets you save webpages so that you can read them on your computer or on your favourite mobile device at a later time.
Features. Like Instapaper, Read It Later offers various browser bookmarklets, but in fact it’s best to use the Firefox extension, which enables you to save pages more rapidly and efficiently. For instance, Click to Save lets you directly save the underlying page for every link you click on at a news site. You can also save all opened tabs when closing your browser. Tags can be assigned to the saved articles, and you can search their titles by keyword. Finally, you can view all pages offline in your browser - for example, it may be convenient for you to browse these on your way to work on the train. To use this feature, click on the Automatically make all saved pages available offline option in the Settings.
Modify. Like with Instapaper, Read It Later shows the bare text of the article, but it also lets you modify the font and the margins, choose white characters on a black background, etc. This makes the articles more pleasant to read. Moreover, you can save webpages as a whole (including all images, videos, etc.), something which Instapaper isn’t able to do as yet.
App. The free Read It Later app allows you to share your articles with others via Facebook, Twitter and some twenty other social networks.
A recent innovation is that the paid version of this app (£0.59) also presents a digest of all your saved articles in the form of a real newspaper.
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