News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Digital Tools I Wish Existed by soupfordummies on Friday November 27, 2020 @11:28AM (#25230007)
I was JUST thinking about this last night. I’m always saving articles to Pocket and I spent like 20 minutes last night trying to find a way to sort that content and gave up because it seems you can’t.

Does anyone remember Readlists? You would input links to different articles and it would format and compile them all into a single kindle ebook.

Re:Digital Tools I Wish Existed by throwdour on Friday November 27, 2020 @01:55PM (#25231569)
Does Pocket work for Medium and/or Twitter? I'm not too concerned about indexing my entire base of knowledge, but I do often locally save a bunch of articles to maybe read on the weekend when I have some time.

Saving Medium blogs and Twitter threads locally just doesn't work, so I've pretty much stopped reading Medium and treat Twitter as purely ephemeral.

Re:Digital Tools I Wish Existed by soupfordummies on Friday November 27, 2020 @08:55PM (#25234444)
Kinnnnd of. It does better on Medium. I had to start sharing Twitter stuff to iOS notes bc I bookmark a lot and I went back to find something and I couldn’t go older than May on phone or PC.

From what I could gather, Twitter’s bookmarks have a limit and it deletes the older but it’s not said out loud.

Re:Digital Tools I Wish Existed by input_sh on Friday November 27, 2020 @04:22PM (#25232682)
If it's a simple Medium article, sure. If it's a monstrosity (for example, this: https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capit...), it doesn't get parsed correctly.

As for Twitter, you can bookmark a link to the tweet, but it won't parse a Twitter thread for example. Same applies for thread compilers (like https://threadreaderapp.com/).

Probably the biggest annoyance with Pocket is that you can highlight stuff, but you can't export your highlights. It has an API, but it doesn't support highlights. Contacting them about that resulted in something like "we're a small team and have no API expansion updates we're willing to share right now" (paraphrasing). They also protect their sign-in form with Google's Captcha, making it non-trivial to scrape that info. The best option I found (https://github.com/karlicoss/pockexport) requires fiddling with browser's dev tools to get the consumer_key, but I couldn't be bothered to get that to work.

Memex (https://getmemex.com/) just gives you a browser extension that allows you to highlight nearly every text on desktop, but becomes completely useless on phones (they're too locked down for something like that to work).

Re:Digital Tools I Wish Existed by shivenigma on Saturday November 28, 2020 @01:28PM (#25239399)
I have a simple bookmarklet that takes pocket highlights in current page and list them in your devTools console. No API keys required as everything is just DOM traversal.

I was also frustrated by their API not supporting highlights, I emailed their support and they replied exporting highlights is a good idea (Yes, Einstein) and they'll consider it. I love pocket TBH but this is really a PITA. So I spent sometime dabbling to create browser extension that let me copy highlights to clipboard, and ended up tuning down to a bookmarklet. Let me know if you want to try it, I can put it somewhere and will share the link.

Re:Digital Tools I Wish Existed by srfwx on Tuesday December 01, 2020 @07:57AM (#25264711)
I'd be interested in that! At the moment I kind of do the work twice. First highlight in Pocket (usually on mobile), then a second time in Chrome Desktop for long-term storage in Dynalist (using the excellent Dynalist Highlighter extension)