A colleague asked “So Scott – tell me again what you do about emails you open with 1) PDFs and 2) links – that you want to read later, on the airplane?”
Here’s what I’ve been doing:
- If I’m on a web page that I want to read – just not now – I quickly archive it (using a bookmarklet) to Instapaper. Instapaper has both an iPhone and an iPad client as well as a browser interface I can use on my Mac – so I can go back and read the article anytime, anyplace. If I sync my iPhone/iPad Instapaper apps before getting on a plane, the articles are all stored in the Instapaper app on the device – so I can read even without network access. I use Instapaper ALOT for asynchronous reading of articles.
- If I’m on a web page that I want to remember – perhaps not an article to read but something else, then I bookmark the page using Pinboard (using another
bookmarklet) – see: http://pinboard.in/tour/. Pinboard provides me a chronological history of interesting pages that I might want to go back do. Has a lot of other features (tagging, etc) that I’m just beginning to learn how to use effectively. - For PDF’s, I just download them to my Downloads directory and periodically go back and review what’s there. If it’s a PDF that I might want to be able to read on my iPhone/iPad, I may save to a Dropbox directory instead – so that I
can access it wherever I have a network connection. This works great when you’re bored at lunch, etc. – except when on a plane. For the plane, you have to remember to download the PDF into your device using Dropbox and to also mark it as a favorite so that it’s saved locally in the device.
How about you? How are you managing your online life?
One reply on “My Online Life”
Looks like we share similar behaviors, and while I’d like to say “great minds think alike”, I’m not presumptuous enough to think that I have a great mind 😉 #1 & #3 are exactly what I do as well for the exact same reasons you listed. For #2 I simply use my browser’s bookmarking capability and have been fairly anal about my folder structure, then I use Xmarks to sync everything up between Firefox and Chrome (I don’t do sync my iPad because I share its use w/my wife), both of which I use on my Mac (different sites work better w/each browser). Xmarks also let’s me store the open tabs on my browsers whenever I have to reboot for any reason.
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