Mefi to Kindle toolchain

February 1, 2013 5:30 AM

What is the killer solution for getting mefi threads, including comments, onto a plain wifi Kindle.

Reposting in metatalk instead of ask at Taz request.

I am primarily interested in solutions that work well with only an iPhone and kindle on hand, but other ways will be useful later. I have tried klipme, pocket and readibility so far. I would rather not authorize my main iPhone mail adress to send to kindle as I am trying to keep my kindle more associated to my nick. Otherwise I suspect mailing from SafariReader is the simplest chain. I would like this to work in as "one click" a way as possible, the thread should go to kindle straight away, not later in the day as a digest etc. If there are solutions that strip extraneous stuff like the favourite links or do decent formatting that would be cherry on top.

Tldr: I have 20 mins of Internet per day, get me mefi from my iPhone to my (physical) Kindle.

I got two good tips already in the original thread re. Klipme and Tinderizer. If someone could post the JavaScript for those bookmarklets I can try then in ios Safari, neither make the bookmarklets very accessible in iOS.

posted by Iteki to MetaFilter-Related at 5:30 AM (18 comments total)

Here's the deleted Ask Metafilter thread. Thanks for reposting here, Iteki.
posted by taz (staff) at 5:32 AM on February 1

Just to be clear, are you asking for entirely offline access? Because otherwise you could just load the website itself in the browser. What didn't you like about Pocket and Readability? There's also Instapaper. Or Evernote has a clip feature, but I've never tried to access my Evernote clippings in a browser so I'm not sure if that would be a solution.
posted by IndigoRain at 5:47 AM on February 1

Because otherwise you could just load the website itself in the browser.

I do this occasionally with my Kindle Touch, but that "Jump to Menu" link at top right, which is supposed to take you to the bottom of the long -- esp if there are a lot of comments, really long -- page, where the nav links are in the mobile version of MeFi, doesn't work. I've always assumed it's yet another quirk of the "experimental browser." But it makes it hard to quickly get around the mobile site on the Touch.
posted by aught at 6:59 AM on February 1

Don't know how to see the javascript of a chrome extension. Tell me how and I'll try to do it.
posted by stupidsexyFlanders at 7:01 AM on February 1

I think that using landscape aspect ratio helps a lot.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 7:15 AM on February 1

Ah, thanks stupidsexyflanders, I meant the bookmarklet, but I got a friend to paste me the code for it and it doesn't seem to work straight off like that. The readibility bookmarklet for safari works well, but only sends me the post, not the comments. I vaguely remember hearing that mefi and Wordpress comments worked similarly if that helps anyone. Hard to imagine somone else hasn't been doing this already.
posted by Iteki at 7:16 AM on February 1

Ftr, go the Tinderizer bookmarklet into Safari, but again, only the post, no comments.
posted by Iteki at 7:46 AM on February 1

If you have an Instapaper Premium account (1$ a month), you can get it to send nicely formatted articles to your Kindle once a week (or whatever frequency you prefer). Instapaper has bookmarklets for all major browsers, and it does a really good job of pulling down MeFi threads and comments. (In fact, Metafilter was one of the reasons Marco started setting up a whitelist for websites where comments should be included.) I read on my iPad with the Instapaper app, but my partner had that set-up on his Kindle and said it was totally worth the money.

There's also this slightly older tip about how to set up an RSS > Yahoo Pipes > IFTTT > Instapaper pipeline (which then in turn can get delivered to your Kindle), but that I think sends ALL threads in a feed to Instapaper and you'd probably be better off just grabbing the specific threads you want.
posted by Phire at 8:24 AM on February 1 [1 favorite]

As long as people are talking about kindle things, my kindle fire renders metafilter in professional white even though I don't have that on my mefi preferences, and i can't figure out how to fix it
posted by Diablevert at 8:36 AM on February 1 [1 favorite]

Sorry the skip to menu link isn't working for you, aught. I have a Kindle Fire running system 6.3.1 and it's checking out fine there. You might go into your browser settings and make sure "Enable JavaScript" is checked.

Diablevert, in the early days when the original black and white Kindle came out we found that the plain text theme without images worked much better so we forced any Kindle to see that view. Today there are color screens with high resolution so it doesn't make as much sense to do that. I turned that off.
posted by pb (staff) at 9:28 AM on February 1 [1 favorite]

You'll probably need to log out and then back in to get the Kindle to recognize your theme preference.
posted by pb (staff) at 9:29 AM on February 1

I'll check that, pb. Honestly, I've never reported it as an issue because JS is often erratic in the Touch's browser. It's absolutely the Touch's limited-functionality "experimental browser" and not Mefi. I just end up doing a lot of spazzy finger scrolling to get to the bottom quickly.
posted by aught at 9:38 AM on February 1

Agree, the premium Instapaper solution is what I use - I love it. It's kinda slow and janky sometimes, but if you just pick out the long threads you really want to browse through and mark them "read later" (instead of trying to navigate the whole site) it works quite well.
posted by Unicorn on the cob at 10:36 AM on February 1

Phire: "There's also this slightly older tip about how to set up an RSS > Yahoo Pipes > IFTTT > Instapaper pipeline (which then in turn can get delivered to your Kindle), but that I think sends ALL threads in a feed to Instapaper and you'd probably be better off just grabbing the specific threads you want.
"

I submitted the tip. The RSS solution is designed to only send *favorited* posts to Instapaper. The key to the use of Yahoo Pipes in this case is that it delays submitting to Instapaper until X days have past, allowing posts to accumulate comments.
posted by Apropos of Something at 12:52 PM on February 1 [1 favorite]

Thanks for reposting this, Iteki, I almost would have missed it because of the deletion. I don't surf MeTa that often, and it's a great question.
posted by tintexas at 2:35 PM on February 1

It's been a while since I tried using Pocket/Instapaper for Metafilter, but IIRC neither service grabs the comments (which for AskMefi is really where the value of the content is). Has it been changed since then?
posted by titantoppler at 3:59 AM on February 2

Taz or other mod: at what point (if any) could I re-repost this to Askme? It seems a bit hampering that the question has to be here because it refers to mefi. I can reword it so that the question related to any form of comments, not only metafilter.
posted by Iteki at 5:06 AM on February 2

You can definitely re-post there reworded, but unfortunately you can't do it until your week-period between questions is up.
posted by taz (staff) at 5:35 AM on February 2