Improve your Internet Reading Experience Using Instaper

From Clutter to Clean in One Click

Overview: You will learn how to use Instapaper.com‘s service to quickly clean, reformat, and save articles on the web to a convenient location for you to read later.

What is Instapaper?

When you are on the internet, you probably find important, interesting, or useful information. The problem is that just don’t have time to read it at that moment. With just one click, Instapaper reads, cleans, and stores the information for you to read at your convenience.

Allows you to easily save information from the web into a central location to be read later on in a clean, simple format.

Advantages of Using Instapaper

Here are some of the main advantages to using Instapaper:

• Clean formatting for efficient reading experience (plain text and simple images)
• Stores the URLs to the source material
• Easily share your saved material
• Great third party integration

When you have a busy page (like the one below) that may have Headers, Footer, Sidebars, Ads, lot’s of media, and other distractions. It is not the optimum reading experience. This can be exacerbated by being on a mobile device or in a hurry.

Just click the Read Later bookmarklet and save a copy for later reading. Check this article to see how bookmarklets improve your browsing experience.

This is what the Instapaper version looks like. A little easier to read, don’t you think?

If you want to see the original page, just click the View Original button at the top of the page.

See How it Works

Here is the whole process:

1. Create an account at Instapaper.com
2. Add the Instapaper bookmarklet to our browser’s toolbar
3. Enter your Instapaper credentials
4. Click the bookmarklet when you find a page that you want to read later
5. Go to Instapaper and read your stuff

See Instapaper in Action in the Video Tutorial Below

Where you can Use Instapaper?

You can use the Read Later bookmarklet in any desktop or mobile browser that supports bookmarks.

Many Twitter clients for iPhone have it built right in.

RSS Readers like Google Reader and some desktop readers.

See the full list of places where you can use Instapaper on their website.

Instapaper Alternatives

There are a few other services that offer similar features out there.

ReaditLater uses a Firefox plugin to save pages to a location where they can be read at your leisure. They have an iPhone app too.

Readability is another tool that works through a bookmarklet to strip out distractions and give you a cleanly formatted page to read.

For the old school types out there, you can try the PrintWhatYouLIke bookmarklet and send a stripped down, clean page to your printer that you can read later.

PrintLiminator does a similar trick and works really nicely.

What’s Your Favorite Tip?

If you have any other tips for cleaning and saving content from the web for reading later, I would love to hear them. Shout it out in the Comments below.