Instapaper

When I started depending more and more on e-resources than actual books, I ended up bookmarking every other page that seemed interesting for reading later or just as a knowledge resource.

This process grew haphazardly over time.I had a few bookmarks saved in my laptop and a few other in desktop, and of course I couldn’t import/sync them (Is there a method to do this? I don’t know).

Then I stumbled upon (real stumble!) Instapaper.It helped me save my bookmarks onto their servers.So I can now manage my bookmarks from laptop and desktop or any other device.I can log into my account and edit/delete/share/like my bookmarks etc.The features are best explained in their site.

The USP of Instapaper is its simplicity, right from the homepage to how your bookmarks are treated.It reminded of those WYSIWYG applications.Its so simple that I do not have much to write about it!

You are given a ‘Read Later’ bookmark which can be added onto your bookmark bar and once you want to bookmark any webpage,just click on the ‘Read Later’ bookmark and your webpage is saved.

Instapaper is free, and a premium membership as of now has no added bonuses.But, the creator of Instapaper Marco Arment is one of those shrewd startup minds and he would come up with something sneeky about the premium membership.Why I call Marco Arment shrewd is because of how he handled the iphone paid and free Instapaper apps.More on this can be found here.

Incidently,Marco Arment was involved with tumblr before he started with Instapaper.

Yes,Instapaper is not the first to offer these services.There is evernote,pinboard,deli.cio.us and even the more recent scrible.But Instapaper struck a chord with me with its in-your-face simplicity and functionality.Scrible may have more fancier features but I don’t see them using it.

Till then,Instapaper will do.

PS : I wish the ‘read later’ bookmark had a favicon.

Adding Gadgets in tumblr

Hack tumblr themes.

By ‘Hack’ I don’t mean an exhaustive modification of code, just a few additions so that, you get the ‘blogger’ experience.

I have noticed that it is not that easy to add a gadget or a widget onto your tumblr account.Here is a brief tutorial on how you can go about it.For example, Have a look at the left hand side bar of this page and you can notice 2 gadgets I have added.

One,the hit counter and another is the AdSanthe gadget which is a project which i worked on for the past 4 months. Know more here.

So, if you want to add gadgets like these, the following tutorial will help you.

Step one : Get the code

Identify what you want to add to your tumblr site. Lets take a hit counter for example, go to hit-counter.info, select the desired type and grab the code.So, whatever gadget you want to add, grab its code.

Step two : Customize

Dashboard -> your site -> Customize
If you are not familiar with HTML the easiest thing to do is
- Click on Info and in the description text box, paste the code that you copied( from hit counter eg.)
Go to step 4.
If you are familiar with HTML, you can easily choose where you want the gadget to be placed.
In the customize page, click on Theme -> Custom HTML
If you want to add the gadget onto the left hand sidebar, find the line where the code for sidebar ends(This is usually commented, so its easy to find it) and just paste the copied code snippet there.
Update
And you are done. This is a very brief tutorial and if you need more help feel free to mail/shout/rant.