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Reading articles on the move

WIP: A workflow for quickly saving a website to your iPhone

Woah, woah, woah. Before you read this, stop. I think Instapaper may be what you’re after — it may not sound exactly what you’re looking for, but it’s pretty handy once you start using it. Enjoy!

I don’t always like to sit at my desk. Sometimes I like to go into the other room and pick up the article on my iPhone. I yearned for a smoother solution, the ability to just sync my current website with my phone and WHAMMO, like some futur solution it came to me. I’d write an app!

Except I didn’t, instead I used what someone else had already made and it works well enough. Follow along if you will.

The solution

It breaks down to two parts really.

Desktop

I use delicious to capture links, but the links I’m wanting to capture for this purpose don’t have to be tagged thoroughly. The important thing here though is that it’s quick and painless. I don’t want the delicious dialog to appear, I just want to auto-tag the current page. Step up Lazy Sheep

Ah, crap. Ok ok, there’s still one dialog, but it’s prefilled. It’s not perfect but it’ll do.

Phone

Ideally what I wanted was some form of auto-redirect from delicious to my most recently tagged bookmark. Something along the lines of the completely fictional http://delicious.com/adonaldson/otm/1 which would magically redirect me invisibly to the url. Shame it doesn’t exist.

Sure I could write a bookmarklet to do it, add it as a Safari bookmark, sync it to my phone, but that felt like effort. I navigated to my on the move tag page, added it as a bookmark and saved it to my home-screen. Job done!

To summarise

When viewing an article I want to read, I click my bookmarklet and save the prefilled form. I then pick up my phone, and hit the ‘on the move’ icon on my home screen.

It’s far from perfect, but not a single line of code was spilled. By me. Leveraging the power of the internet!