If you are anything like me, (a) how are you finding it? and (b) you probably have a lot of entries in del.icio.us tagged “toread” or “to_read” etc. etc. which you have not got round to actually, y’know, reading.
Yesterday I made the effort to actually print out some of the things I had tagged to read, and – read them!
What I’d like, LazyWeb, therefore – is a site/script/widget/thing that would
- grab the URLs of what I have tagged “to_read” (or an arbitrary tag, of course)
- goes and gets the text found at those URLs (this doesn’t have to be pretty)
- then smooshes them together into a file I can then print or save for later printing.
How about it?
Almost guaranteed fame on lifehacker/43folders would be yours, as well as my undying gratitude.
UPDATE:
Matt Biddulph contributes this:
OK, you need lynx installed to get a nice dump of html to text file.
For a mac, http://www.osxgnu.org/software/pkgdetail.html?
project_id=226&cat_id=211 might have what you need.Paste this in a terminal window on any mac or unix machine:
for a in `curl http://del.icio.us/rss/blackbeltjones/toread | grep
'<link>' | cut -d\> -f 2 | cut -d\ toread.txtand it’ll make reading.txt with a html2text concatenation of all your
toread links.
Excellent – will try this on the weekend and report back…
Cheers,
Matt.
Petafloptimism 
Think you’ve got some mispasted characters there.
Should be:
for a in `curl http://del.icio.us/rss/blackbeltjones/toread | grep '' | cut -d\> -f 2 | cut -d\ toread.txtGah. I’m being thick. In fact, what you’ve pasted is fine but there’s a that’s being hidden by the browser (just as mine was when I commented). Escape it with & lt; and & gt;
Maybe you could do this with Automator? I’m not at my Mac now, but it seems like it would work, especially if you have BBEdit or something else that can do the text-concatenating.
What about something that turned those articles into a podcast for you to listen to as you did other things? Recently I’ve downloaded Microsoft Reader and then got a text-to-speech plugin for it. Then I got another plugin for MSWord that turned copy & pasted articles into eBooks that MSReader could understand and read to me. Apart from every author sounding like Stephen Hawkin, it works OK so long as I’m at my desk. So the next thing is to get the whole shebang turned into a podcast. There’s a product in it.
Ok, here’s a quickie Automator attempt at this. It works fine, although it’s a little ugly: the dialog that prompts you for a URL is a regular server connection dialog, error-handling isn’t exactly the cleanest, and the resulting text file is only as readable as the target page’s HTML is clean. One of my to-read articles from InfoWorld was indecipherable as plaintext, although other things are ok. Also, no good way to divide each article with a horizontal rule or series of dashes.
Anyway: here’s a .zip of the Automator Workflow and application both:
http://www.heyotwell.com/stuff/ReadSomethingGood.zip
http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000707071579/