INSTAPAPER HIGHLIGHTS TO NVALT ACTION WITH IFTTT
I read stuff all the time. In the morning, in the evening and in between, when time allows. I feel most comfortable reading on my iPad and secondly my iPhone (but not for longer periods of time). I have 3 primary sources when I read:
- .pdf files which I read using iAnnotate on my iPad or PDF Expert on my iphone.
- the Kindle app for both iPad and iPhone.
- the Instapaper app which gives me access to my Instapaper account.
With some of the stuff I read (specifically the non-fiction stuff) I do highlights. Now, as I’ve described in earlier blog posts I use DEVONthink Pro to manage all kinds of information, including .pdf’s, web archives, Office documents and what not.
I also use nvALT for jotting down smaller notes, often formatted in markdown, and I’ve configured it to use a Dropbox folder for storage. This enables me to let iOS apps (like Notesy, Nebulous Notes or SimpleNote) access the notes when I’m on the go. As part of this setup I let DEVONthink Pro index my nvALT folder, which will include it’s contents in the database along with all the other files.
I also like to import my highlights to DEVONthink Pro. For the Kindle website and .pdf’s I have Apple scripts which gets the job done. So my Instapaper account was the odd one out.
But just the other day, IFTTT released a new Instapaper channel which enables a couple of triggers.
- New item saved: Fires when you save an item to your Instapaper account.
- New liked item: Fires when you like a new item in Instapaper.
- New highlighted item: Fires every time you highlight a piece of text in Instapaper.
- New archived item: Fires every time you archive an item in Instapaper.
- Item moved to folder: Fires every time you move an item to af specified folder.
And one action:
- Save item: Saves a new item to Instapaper
What’s most interesting to me is of course the New higlighted item trigger. With this I’ve created an IFTTT recipe which appends the highlight to a text file in my nvALT folder. The filename is created if it does not exist, and is named by the article title with ‘-InstaHigh’ appended. The format of each highlight goes like this:
##Daring Fireball: Only Apple
>"Google’s mindset a decade ago was centered around web apps running in browsers. Google didn’t need its own platform because every PC had a browser and people would use those browsers to do everything Google provided in browser tabs. That meta-platform approach has limits, though, particularly when it comes to post-PC devices. Their stated reason for buying Android wasn’t because they wanted to design and control the post-PC device experience, but because they wanted an open mobile platform on which their web services could not be locked out."
*on June 17, 2014 at 10:47AM*, [via Instapaper](http://ift.tt/1pt4jCt)
which will render it like this in html (of course depending on the stylesheet):
Daring Fireball: Only Apple
“Google’s mindset a decade ago was centered around web apps running in browsers. Google didn’t need its own platform because every PC had a browser and people would use those browsers to do everything Google provided in browser tabs. That meta-platform approach has limits, though, particularly when it comes to post-PC devices. Their stated reason for buying Android wasn’t because they wanted to design and control the post-PC device experience, but because they wanted an open mobile platform on which their web services could not be locked out.”
on June 17, 2014 at 10:47AM, via Instapaper
This way, the highlights of my 3 reading sources all go into DEVONthink Pro, either through Apple Scripts (.pdf’s and Kindle) or my nvALT folder on Dropbox.
Steps:
- Use a Dropbox folder as storage for nvALT
- Activate below recipe and modify to suit your needs
- Ensure that DEVONthink is indexing the nvALT Dropbox folder
You can get the recipe here: