- Save pages to a reading list to read when you have time
- Offline Reading Mode - Read the items you’ve saved for later on the plane, train, or anywhere
- Randomly surf through your list or select specific items
- After reading, bookmark pages on your preferred bookmarking service
- Right-click links to add to your list instead of following each link
Version 0.8 Released!
Major updates include: hotkey support, offline reading mode, and a full recode. Read more here.
Overview
This Firefox extension allows you to save pages of interest to read later. It eliminates cluttering of bookmarks with sites that are merely of a one-time interest. A commenter below (Chris) summed it up very well: “It’s a ’staging area’ for bookmarks.”
Jump down after the video for more information.
Video Example: How This Can Be Used with News Sites
If you have a personalized homepage (i.e. Pageflakes or iGoogle) or frequent news sites like (i.e. Digg or CNN), you can quickly scan all of the headlines on the site, saving all links of interest by right-clicking and saving to your list. When you are done, just start going through your list, uninterrupted. Beats having to go back and forth though-out the site!
How it Came to Be
I found that during the day (and especially at work), that I would run into sites and articles that I wanted to read, but couldn’t at that time. Mostly, I would just send the link to myself via email, and in the end, they would never get read because I’d lose it in my inbox. I needed a simple way to keep track of the things I wanted to read, but didn’t want to bookmark (at least not at first).
Why this Helps
Excluding this plugin, I see two options for creating a list of pages you want to read:
The Old Way:
- You can log the URLs by emailing yourself or writing them in a text file. This is cumbersome and hard to move through or find.
- Bookmark the site in a special tag or folder of ‘To-Read-Later’. This works well for keeping your links in a single source, but it is a pain to go in and remove or re-categorize each page after you read it. Also, if you use an online bookmarking service, it means you’ll have to login in and go through a few clicks before getting to your list.
The above methods are honestly, just workarounds to what should be a simple task. The Read it Later extension is meant to provide an easier solution.
The New Way:
- When you come across something you want to read later, simply click the ‘Read Later’ button and the page is instantly inserted into your reading list.
- Then when you have some free time, just click ‘Reading List’ and it’ll randomly pull up something for you to read.
- When you are finished, click Mark it As Read and it will be removed from your list.
If you found what you read to be worth bookmarking, you can use the dropdown under Mark it As Read to add it to your Firefox bookmarks or any online bookmark service such as Del.icio.us.
Installation/Setup Instructions
Chris Rossini on LearnFirefox has written up a great set of instructions (complete with screenshots) on how to setup and use the Read it Later Extension.
Here: Read It Later Installation Instructions
How to Sync With Other Computers
Since version 0.5, your reading list is saved in your Firefox bookmarks under a folder called ‘Read It Later’. This allows you to use a browser sync plug-in like Foxmarks or Google Browser Sync to synchronize your bookmarks between multiple computers.
One thing to note: When the Read It Later Extension is installed it creates a folder called ‘Read It Later’. On each computer the folder will be unique so that when you sync you’ll end up with two folders called Read It Later. To fix this, after doing the first sync, select ‘options’ from the Reading List button dropdown. Then choose the first option ‘Select Read It Later bookmark folder’ and change the folder to make sure both computers are selected on same one.
Offline Mode (experimental)
A quick note you should be aware of: as it stands, the Offline Mode is pretty experimental. With that being said, it is pretty easy to take your reading list offline (and onto the plane or train). Before disconnecting from the internet, click ‘Prepare List for Offline Reading’ from the Reading List dropdown. This will open all of the pages in your list and save them onto your computer. This may take a few seconds to a minute (depending on the length of your list). Once it’s done to read your offline versions, switch Firefox to ‘Work Offline’ (under the File menu). Then click the Reading List button to pull something from your list.
Hotkey: Add Link
You can add a link to your Reading List by right clicking and selecting ‘Read This Link Later’ from the context menu. But to really speed things up, you can just hold down the R-key and click the link as well.
What To Do If You Have Problems!
Don’t Panic. This extension is in Beta, which means that it’s still being worked on and is not ‘final’. So this means that for some it will work just fine, some will encounter bugs, and for a small percentage of people the extension may or may not unleash a zombie attack upon your small town.
Regardless of what happens, you can help development of the plugin by doing the following:
- Make sure you have the latest version. You can download it by clicking ‘install’ at the top of the page.
- Are there any errors when using the plugin? [How to check for errors]
- Leave a detailed description of what’s happening in the comments. Please leave an email where I can contact you, I typically respond personally to each problem.
If you need to downgrade to a previous version I’ve supplied some of the major releases here:
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