Read It Later on my Kindle

When I got a Kindle recently, I thought that it would be ideal to shift some of this long-form reading from the iPhone to the Kindle’s larger and easier-on-the-eyes screen. A bit of searching turned up Kindlefeeder, a website that will collate RSS feeds and send them as a single document either directly to your Kindle (incurring a $0.15 charge from Amazon) or to your email address, whence you can then transfer to the Kindle via USB. RIL provides feeds for a user’s reading list (here’s mine http://readitlaterlist.com/users/kachooney/feed/unread – you may have to edit your RIL privacy controls to make sure that your items feed is not password-protected). I plugged this feed into Kindlefeeder, but immediately ran up against a wall: RIL’s feed contained titles only. Since my goal was to make my reading list available offline, I needed full feeds.

This seemed like a job for Yahoo Pipes. (Bonus for me: I had never given YP more than a cursory glance in the past, so this was a good chance for me to learn the ropes, er, pipes.) The strategy: hand my RIL titles-only feed to YP, and tell YP to fetch the full text of each item and store it in item>description of a new RSS feed. Then, subscribe to the YP RSS feed with Kindlefeeder. Here’s a sample: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.edit?_id=3a0be51021240c9eda3541ce5041a29f.

You’ll notice that I’ve filtered out feed items pointing back to http://nytimes.com. That’s because the NYT (1) breaks up most articles into multiple pages, and (2) publishes pages that are uniform to submit to a single parse. NYT feeds are thus handled by a different pipe, one with a few extra steps. First, instead of calling up the item>link from the RIL feed, I get the printer-friendly version (so that it contains the entire article text on a single page). Second, I filter out the header and footer material (advertisements, navigation, etc.) with “cut content” under “Fetch Page”. If, in the future, I find myself sending a lot of items to RIL from another source with similarly uniform markup, I might create yet another filter to strip the extraneous content off.

The final snag in this setup: free Kindlefeeder accounts will not fetch RSS feeds created by Yahoo Pipes, because these feeds take so long to create and therefore put undue stress on Kindlefeeder’s servers. At $20/year, the ability to transport my reading list to the Kindle seemed worth it to buy a Kindlefeeder premium account. So congrats, Kindlefeeder – you got a customer out of me. (Another cost justification – it’s possible to use a similar process to fetch the entire contents of various magazines from the partial feeds they publish on their websites. $20/year is pretty cheap for unlimited magazine subscriptions on the Kindle.)

So go make some computer technologies of your own. Get out of the house and go do it!

Related posts:

1. Saving tweeted items for later
2. Pitching the Kindle
3. New BuddyPress plugin: BP Lotsa Feeds