![]() For many, it’s leaving home, commuting via public transportation, and powering up their iPhone,” he said. “For some people it starts with waking up, sitting down with a cup of coffee, and flipping through the newspaper. Levine said they wanted to adjust the social reading app to the new news routine. ![]() Paperboy, the geofencing feature they created, was made by iOS developer Rob Haining, who detailed some of the back-end specifics. Jake Levine, general manager of, told me over email most of the team are subway riders, so they ran into the offline reading problem frequently. Of course, back then, you didn’t have to wait for that latest article from New York to download before you could read it. You made sure to have a magazine or book with you when you hopped on a plane or subway. In one way or another, we geofenced our reading in analog ways in the past. Instapaper and are putting a new spin on it, an ingenious nod to the old/new reading habit that is being developed. Geofencing is popular in retail circles because it’s a way of potentially pulling in customers. ![]() Similarly, Instapaper lets you set 10 different locations (home, office, classroom, gym, your favorite bar, etc.) that will trigger updates.Īll of this is possible thanks to geofencing, the same idea that pings us when we’re near a restaurant we want to try on Foursquare or shoots us a reminder to pick up laundry detergent when we’re near a market. In, you define your home location in the app and whenever you leave those coordinates, it grabs the latest news. In English: It grabs your newest stories whenever you enter or leave a place. Now two reading apps - a month ago and, as of Saturday, Instapaper - have updated their apps to allow location-based background downloads of new stories. It’s an annoyance, but an important one given the increasing amount of time we spend with mobile devices and our access-anywhere expectations. Okay, sure, the commuter’s dilemma falls squarely in the category of first world problems. The subway/plane door closes, and so does your window of opportunity. ![]() You scramble to launch your favorite reading app only to find you can’t update it in time. Suddenly you remember that one great story you saw and wanted to read later. Ethan’s, however, required a bunch of searching, because it was not at all obvious to me how to get an RSS link from a Medium blog.Raise your hand if this scenario sounds familiar: You’re rushing to catch the subway/plane and only moments before boarding do you stop to think about what you’re going to read en route. Brian’s wasn’t too hard to find on his website. Getting the feed triggers was trickier than I expected. Image credit : me.įor sending Brian’s and Ethan’s posts to my Instapaper, my answers were : Ifttt configuration for Ethan Siegel’s Medium blog. Will the recipe allow me to include the content I want?.When creating ifttt recipes, the big questions I ask are : You can read more about the service here, or browse the many, many pre-existing recipes here. ![]() ifttt stands for “if this then that.” When the service detects some condition, it triggers an event in another service. Image credit : īut there are two feeds I always want sent to my Instapaper–the amazing pieces from Brian Koberlein’s One Universe at a Time and Ethan Siegel’s Starts With A Bang! In this post, I’ll describe how I created ifttt rules for automatically capturing new articles from these sources.įor these “Script Away Your Annoyances” posts, I often describe a Ruby script I’ve created to save some time and avoid errors, but today I’ll show you how I use ifttt for automation. Most of my content comes from articles I’ve selected as worthy and sent over to Instapaper for further review. Lately, I’ve turned to Instapaper as my preferred tool for collecting articles I want to read. ![]()
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