Lars Tesmer's Blog

From Journeyman to Master - A Software Craftsman's Blog

No Time to Read That Blog - Read It Later!

In order to keep up-to-date with what's going on in the tech world, I read a lot of blogs, visit Hacker News regularly etc. during my lunch break for example.

Frequently, I will stumble upon seemingly interesting articles but either they're too long to be read during the break or there's no time left to read them.
What I used to do until a year ago was to move those articles into a bookmark folder called 'toread', in order to remember to read it when I would have more time. But it was always a bit of a hassle, so I was never really satisfied with that solution.

Then I discovered Read It Later.

It's a Firefox Addon that with the click on a button or hitting a keyboard shortcut will save the page you're currently viewing into a list for later access.
When you have time, you can check out said list and with one click or shortcut, you remove the page from the list and Read It Later will get you to the next page you've saved in chronological order.
Not only that, it also integrates with Google Reader, allowing you to directly save articles without having to leave it.
Additionally, if you use several computers, you can optionally save the list remotely, so you can access the same list from different computers.
And there are many more features, for example an API you can use to code your own app.

The way I use it is that I'll put articles into it until I hit the threshold of 100 saved items and when I have time, e.g. during the weekend, I'll go through those items and read them - or rather, not read them.
That's the beauty about this, often it will turn out that the article or blog I'm getting to isn't that interesting after all and I can quickly move to the next article in the list.
And that decision is really based on my thinking it isn't interesting and not by feeling under pressure due to lack of time.

This is absolutely one of those Firefox addons I don't want to live without anymore.