Search doesn’t solve everything; even Google instant can’t ensure you’ll always be able to find that skateboarding dog, and when you visit that genius mac blog 15 times a day the act of dragging your finger away from the trackpad to type the letter ‘t’ is a time suck. ‘Cmd-D’ has always been the solution, but that just adds to the mess of bookmarks lost and forgotten in folders on my toolbar.
Read It Later has been around for a while, but I never realized its abilities beyond storing interesting blog posts for reading on your next trip to the loo. I finally gave it a try (once my Google reader badge was an intimidating 1000+) and installed the 3rd party browser extension Postponer. It enables you to name, tag, and store pages from a popup window within the address bar. The toolbar icon displays another popup window listing your recent articles where you can search, filter, and ‘mark as read’ your bookmarked sites — you can even read a plain text version of the site from right within the window.
Being able to add and name a bookmark without any right clicks, dragging and dropping, or keyboard shortcuts is good enough for me, but Read it Later provides much more. The tagging and instant search provide a perfect setup for creating shopping lists, managing project research, or grouping sites you visit consistently but not frequently enough to warrant a bookmark in your toolbar. When you stumble upon those new headphones you need to have, tag the URL ‘buy’, and then when you have time to do your online shopping, just search ‘buy’ and there’s your list. There’s a pro version with interesting analytics and auto-organizing features, and the mobile apps provide some sexy-interfaced reading functionality. If you want to get to your sites without digging through years of bookmarks, or if you want some more room in your browser window give it a try. Grab a browser extension here, if you have Chrome go for Postponer.
Similar tools like Instapaper exist; does anyone know how they measure up?