instapaper-to-mdlog

instapaper-to-mdlog

Small CLI tool to keep a running log of archived Instapaper articles.

I built this to capture my Instapaper reading history in Obsidian, but this tool outputs generic markdown, so can work with a variety of tools.

There's also nothing Instapaper specific about this, so it could also be used for other services that offer RSS feeds to indicate activity.

Installation

$ go install github.com/bcongdon/instapaper-to-mdlog

Format

instapaper-to-mdlog produces and updates a "dated log" in Markdown list format of archived Instapaper items. The look looks like the following:

# January 3, 2021

- [Some Article](http://example.org/article1)
- [Another Article](http://example.org/article2)

# January 2, 2021

- [Yet Another Article](http://example.org/article3)

# January 1, 2021

- [Yet Yet Another Article](http://example.org/article4)

Note that the date of each article is not the publish/update date of the article, but rather the date that the article was discovered by instapaper-to-mdlog. This is because instapaper-to-mdlog is designed to capture the day you read the article (e.g. archived it) instead of the day that the article was created.

Usage

First, go to your Instapaper Archive, click on your username/email in the upper-right corner, and then click "Download > RSS Feed". Copy the URL of the resulting feed, and use it as the input to -feedURL.

You can set where the log is updated with -out.

$ instapaper-to-mdlog -feedURL <FEED_URL> -out out.md

instapaper-to-mdlog is designed to be used with cron. For example, by updating your reading log every hour:

0 * * * * /path/to/instapaper-to-mdlog -feedURL $FEED_URL -out /path/to/out.md