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Ask HN: How do you keep track of articles you want to read?

57 points by pastaking ↗ HN
When I browse HN, I usually pick out a few articles I want to read from the front page, then email the links to myself to read later.

This method works out pretty well for me. I’m wondering if people have other strategies that work better?

77 comments

[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 111 ms ] thread
brudgers
The |favorite| link on each story is one way. The advantage, it is integrated to HN.
Djvacto
I use the favorite link, as mentioned in the other comment, but I also use Pocket, and its chrome extension. I have the app on my phone, and my e-reader downloads my pocket saves for me to read offline.
aytekin
I use Instapaper but I have also recently started trying out Pocket. These tools are effective since it is very easy to set a bookmark let to save articles for later.

One great thing about them is that they allow you read articles offline and without ads and in the format you want such as black background.

tarun_anand
Yup...this is how I do it too actually for all sites
cncrnd
Bookmarks bar folder on chrome.

Don't see the need for a specialized app, which I would enthusiastically install and then never touch again.

Jallam
I have a bookmark folder and within that folder i have multiple folders “philosophy”, “politics”, etc. Moreover, i have Evernote i created a a note book called “Inbox” where random articles are saved in to read later.
furo
I use Safari as my daily browser so I end up just using the Reading List feature. It works well, but if you want more options like tagging/categorizing then it's a no go.
ajeet_dhaliwal
I open them in a new tab and come back to them when ready. This ensures I’ll actually read them relatively soon. Bookmarks would be forgotten about by me and some more involved method seems like overkill.
robertAngst
What if I have 6 chome windows each with 10-30 tabs?
beagle3
Switch to firefox. I have one window with over 1000 tabs, and it all takes just 4GB virtual, 2GB resident.

Older versions gave me the incentive to sort things out by slowing down with many tabs or taking too much memory. Now, I unfortunately just accumulate :( At the current rate, I'll likely never get down to 0, as I find more interesting things per day than I can read....

severine
Also, if you still have memory/performance problems, these two addons make a noticeable difference:

- LoadTabOnSelect: Load new tabs on selection. This addon will prevent new tabs from automatically loading, instead loading them on selection.

The intended usage of the addon is to facilitate power-users who open many tabs before viewing, but dislike auto-playing videos (and other annoyances).

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/loadtabonsele...

--

- Auto Tab Discard: Use native tab discard method to automatically reduce memory usage of inactive tabs. Auto Tab Discard a lightweight extension that uses the native method (tabs.discard) to unload or suspend browser tabs to significantly reduce the memory footprint of your browser when many tabs are opened.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-disc...

edit: typos

BerislavLopac
> LoadTabOnSelect

As this is a built-in feature of Firefox, I'm curious if there are any additional benefits this addon provides?

Edit: Oh, I'm a bit slow, apparently this prevents loading a tab even on the initial click (the built-in option only prevents it on startup). Thanks, looks useful!

ajeet_dhaliwal
The original question is asking about a few articles he/she wants to read later, if you have 180 articles (6 * 30) you want to get back to you’d probably we wise to use an alternate system. Personally I am familiar with the problem the original question asks about and that’s how I find it frictionless to handle. If it’s getting to such a large number as you describe I doubt I’d ever come back to reading them because I’d notice something new I’m interested in too and keep adding to the list.
BerislavLopac
Switch to Firefox, with the option to load tabs only when they're in focus. Your computer will be very grateful for that.
mdrzn
I rarely have a Chrome window with less than 50 tabs, but at least it'll encourage you to take the time to read the articles.
abhishekjha
Linux OS with SSD really gave me a different picture. I have 338 tabs open right now across 5 chrome windows. It is taking up almost all of my RAM but the response is very very quick. I had HDD earlier and my OS used to crash every now and then. Now I keep putting my computer to hibernate/sleep and I am able to retrieve history up until a month.
jenhsun
1. Both Pinboard and Pocket as my main bookmarklet storage. They're just storage but not necessary to read them all.

2. Instapaper and emailthis as my "to read" tools. Instapaper is very nice for article readability (better than pocket) and emailthis as article storage, or sometimes needs to send out to friends or colleagues.

3. Zotero as main research or pdf keeper.

4. I don't use Evernote now because I already bumped into their 100,000 limitation three years ago.

5. Please remember to use "star" or "Love" to pin your important bookmarks. It'll help someday.

sametmax
Books : amazon wishlist Internet content : bookmark Anything else : gtd personnal archive system

Little trick : telegram has a "saved messages" chat where you can write messages, including photos, audio and video. It works offline, automatically synchronize when you get online with all telegram instances.

You can put a direct shorcut to it on your android home screen, meaning you have a synchronized multimedia in-basket system between all your devices. I just dump all my random thougths or todo in it to sort it out the next morning.

So somebody talk about something i might wanna read ? I just take 2s to dumo it into the chat and forget about it. Later, i review it, assess if i really want to read it, and if yes, i put it in the proper list.

gmuslera
Newsblur. You put the HN RSS in its feeds, and you have a folder for saving stories and/or tagging them.
complex1314
Thanks! Looks neat, will try that one out.
beagle3
Second newsblur, its awesome; My two missing features is adding a random website (not an rss / mailing-list article), and storing the article text for offline/archive.

I am a paying customer, planning to run my own instance when I have the time, but it's been so reliable that I just can't prioritize switching to my own instance over other stuff...

kozziollek
I use Firefox everywhere.

When using phone, during commute to/from the job, I send links to desktop using Firefox's built in feature.

When using desktop at the job, I read articles instantly or send them to desktop at home.

At desktop at home I have Panorama View extension [1] to avoid tab clutter.

I plan to install Wallabag [2] on my server to have place to categorize and store already read articles.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/pl/firefox/addon/panorama-view/ [2] https://wallabag.org/

abhishekjha
> I read articles instantly or send them to desktop at home.

From phone to desktop? Is it possible in an iPhone?

mezzode
I get most of my articles by Feedly and save them there if they are short or time relevant like news, but I use Pocket for any articles which are longer and more in-depth.
satran
I use a text file named "read". I store links as a list. When I have read them and it was worth storing I move it to a subsection called read and write notes or copy content if necessary. It looks somewhat like this:

    # To Read
    - [ ] [Ask HN: How do you keep track of articles you want to read?](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17637835)
    
    # Read
    - [x] [why children aren’t behaving and what you can do about it](https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2018/06/02/611082566/why-children-arent-behaving-and-what-you-can-do-about-it)
    This is a short interview with the author of the book “The Good News About Bad Behavior“. It’s interesting how the author talks about disciplining kids.
The good thing about plain text is you can create any organizing method you like. If you want tags just create them :) If an article was useless I remove it. It uses basic github flavoured markdown format that I can render if I want to.

Someday I plan to automate it using a firefox plugin.

se7entime
are you using this method when mobile too?
yannovitch
I don't.

I have started bookmarking 10 years ago everything I find interesting, thinking I would be able quickly to read them later, and now, 10 years later, I have 34.000 bookmarks, of which there is at least 32.000 I am still waiting to read in depth.

But it's changing. I took some "vacations" to focus on closing this gap, and do it full time for the past days. So hopefully there will soon be "only" 1000 "to-read-soon" articles in my bookmarks ;)

yannovitch
That being said, I recommend you using "Shaarli" (with extensions available for all browsers and on iOS and Android) as your read-later system, I found it to be pretty useful and effective.
true_religion
I bookmark them into a folder named "Reading List". If after two weeks, I haven't read it, then I reconsider if it needs to be kept.
rainbowmverse
I save anything that looks interesting in Pocket and sort it out later. My to-read list never gets bigger than 10 articles. Other people seem to struggle with this.
aidanfindlater
I used Instapaper (https://www.instapaper.com/), then moved to Pocket (https://getpocket.com/) to take advantage of the social features, then moved back to Instapaper for no really good reason. Pocket still looks nicer and the apps are more reliable, in my experience.

They both allow you to save the full text of an article to read later, as well as archiving and organizing articles you've already read. They sync to phones, so most of my reading actually happens on public transit. Pocket can also sync to a Kobo ebook reader; not sure about Kindle, but I wouldn't be surprised if it worked with them, too.

antjanus
I'm a fan of Pocket as well. It's what I use. It's also easy to quickly look up old articles I've read or to find new content to read via recommended/explore option.

Plus you've got that whole cross-platform thing.

vjsc
You just add them to your favorites ... Remove them later if you dont like them ..