Script Away Your Annoyances – Automatically Publish Your Favorite Feeds in Instapaper

Lately, I’ve turned to Instapaper as my preferred tool for collecting articles I want to read. Most of my content comes from articles I’ve selected as worthy and sent over to Instapaper for further review.

But there are two feeds I always want sent to my Instapaper–the amazing pieces from Brian Koberlein’s One Universe at a Time and Ethan Siegel’s Starts With A Bang! In this post, I’ll describe how I created ifttt rules for automatically capturing new articles from these sources.

ifttt?

For these “Script Away Your Annoyances” posts, I often describe a Ruby script I’ve created to save some time and avoid errors, but today I’ll show you how I use ifttt for automation. ifttt stands for “if this then that.” When the service detects some condition, it triggers an event in another service. You can read more about the service here, or browse the many, many pre-existing recipes here.

The Problem – and Solution

When creating ifttt recipes, the big questions I ask are :

1. What “if..then” trigger do I need?
2. What “that” action do I need?
3. Will the recipe allow me to include the content I want?

For sending Brian’s and Ethan’s posts to my Instapaper, my answers were :

1. The “feed” trigger.
2. The Instapaper “save item” action.
3. Yes–using {{EntryUrl}} for the URL field, {{EntryContent}} for Description, and {{EntryTitle}} for Title.

Getting the feed triggers was trickier than I expected. Brian’s wasn’t too hard to find on his website. Ethan’s, however, required a bunch of searching, because it was not at all obvious to me how to get an RSS link from a Medium blog. Thankfully, I found Tony Mucci’s article about a related topic and learned the pattern for Medium RSS links is “https://medium.com/feed/@.”
Thus, the links for Brian and Ethan are :

1. https://briankoberlein.com/feed
2. https://medium.com/feed/starts-with-a-bang

Conclusion

I hope that this article will make it a little easier for you the next time you need to get blog posts automatically pushed into another reader service!

Other posts in this series:

• Script Away Your Annoyances – Testing a Data Import Process
• Script Away Your Annoyances – Employing Automator in a Pinch
• Script Away Your Annoyances – Creating Word Groupings from Anki’s Database
• Script Away Your Annoyances – Removing Manual Project Setup Tasks