A Look At The Local DC Tech Scene and Other Technology and Social Media Musings

I love two things and consume them veraciously, RSS Feeds in Google Reader and my Amazon Kindle.  Until now they have been mutually exclusive until I learned of this nice little workflow that led to a combination of the two.

RSS feeds are great for consuming a lot of news in a short amount of time, but when I come across a more lengthy post I usually star it so I will look at it later.  There is one problem, I RARELY if ever go back later and read those posts, leaving my starred items stacking up unread …  However, on my Kindle, without the distractions of other browser tabs, etc, I usually am able to more focus on just reading what is in front of me.  I read books, the NY Times, magazines.  It seems to much better suit me for reading longer pieces.  I thought, if only I could read these interesting items I find in Google Reader on my Kindle.  Well after about 2 minutes of Googleing and configuring I found the solution.  Instapaper.

Instapaper is a great lightweight way to save articles for reading later.

Instapaper facilitates easy reading of long text content.

We discover web content throughout the day, and sometimes, we don’t have time to read long articles right when we find them.

Instapaper allows you to easily save them for later, when you do have time, so you don’t just forget about them or skim through them.

And the great thing is Google Reader already has a hook to allow you to send a post to Instapaper right form their interface.  When you see a post you want to save for later reading, simply click the Send To button and send it to Instapaper.  Ok, so you are probably thinking, this is great Jimmy but where does the Kindle come into play …  Right now.

One great feature of Instapaper is it has a way to integrate with your Kindle !  You can simply have Instapaper send you a digest of your unread articles every day or every week.  Instapaper combines all the posts into one digest and send it to your Kindle email address, which processes the document and sends it to your Kindle wirelessly.  Now one note, Amazon charges a small fee for this, $0.15 per megabyte, basically nothing because the digest is simply small text.  You can even set the number of articles the digest must contain before it sends it to your Kindle.  This way you do not get a digest every day with one article if you have it set higher

Now when I am perusing my feeds and I find a longer post I want to send to my Kindle for reading later, I simply hit the Send To -> Instapaper and depending on how I have my schedule set up I will receive that digest and be able to read those articles right on the Kindle.

I hope this helps some of my fellow Kindle readers out there and would love to hear of any other workflow tips that you all might have to combine some of these technologies with our Kindle.

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