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Pocket gets worse the more you use it (2019)

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Re: Pocket gets worse the more you use it (2019)

#61
Being a silly person, my method of tagging things to archive and read later is stupid simple:

I copy/paste/append the url to a text file, links.txt, along with a cut&paste of what its about.

I can have multiples of those files. Search them with grep, whatever.

I abandoned bookmarking tools long ago, because they reinvented (poorly) things like search, backups, etc., besides probably selling my bookmarks to some data aggregator.

Re: Pocket gets worse the more you use it (2019)

#62
post #13

My use case for Pocket is completely different from the author’s. I use it every day to get web content onto a Kobo ereader. It strips ads and often gets stuff behind paywalls. My family shares the same pocket account and we often end up discussing things that get synced to all the kobos in the house. This functionality is so useful and seems like a well kept secret. If it went away I’d really be upset.

I used it to read articles offline on my iPad. It worked maybe 50% of the time. Now I use instapaper.

Re: Pocket gets worse the more you use it (2019)

#63
post #3

The Pocket thing was when I started to feel Mozilla lost their way. For a while I tried to maintain a patch that completely removed it. But, that's not fun. The Idea of Pocket is great - seems everyone needs a personal-knowledge-base. And the archival feature was/is cool (I added the same to my own PKB). And Pocket for organizing, messy like the article says. I do tagging and SQLite FTS - works a treat.

I remember that mozilla promised to open source the pocket backend and that went nowhere

Re: Pocket gets worse the more you use it (2019)

#65
Pocket sucks. I used it to save articles to read them offline later. About half of the articles would not load offline for a reason or another. Sometimes they would download and I would look at them on my iPad, then they would be grayed out the second I turned WiFi off. A bunch of others would only load in web view, but without images.

I have no idea of how a product can be so unreliable at its main job for so long. Instapaper has been rock solid so far.

Re: Pocket gets worse the more you use it (2019)

#66
FWIW, for this use case of creating curated sets of web pages, I find that Pinboard (https://pinboard.in) works really well for this case. When researching a project I'll tag pages with the project id and other relevant tags I'm using (like "sdr" or "camping-gear") and then the search function can instantly give me the list of pages I was looking at. There was a greasemonkey script that would take the search results page of Pinboard and open all the links in tabs in a new window but I have lost track of that at the moment.

Re: Pocket gets worse the more you use it (2019)

#67

Original author here. My six-year-old rant still mostly applies (there've been some improvements to tag editing, and there's now in-article search for the Android app), but Pocket still massively underdelivers, increasingly as one relies on it more. Most recently, I found I had to revert to a six-month-old version of the app in order to have both paginated navigation and to be able to open the "web view" in app ... w…

> I'm familiar with Zotero and Calibre, though both are desktop only

There's a third-party Zotero client for Android named "Zoo for Zotero" that has worked well for me: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mickstarif.... However, I usually use it to read academic papers on my phone that I have already added to my library using my computer. I tried adding something new to my Zotero library on my phone as I was typing this comment, and sadly the interface seems a little clumsy: I can add papers to a collection but not a subcollection

Re: Pocket gets worse the more you use it (2019)

#68
Most "read it later" services save web pages on their servers, which cannot preserve paywalls, ad-free content, pages that require login or registration, and pages on a local network.

Sharing why I decided to develop my own "read it later" software.

1. I have a habit of saving web pages I like, most of which are in MHTML format, some are saved as single-file HTML, and others are web archives saved on iOS. Altogether, I have accumulated thousands of them.

2. On my computer, I can preview them one by one, but I cannot search through them. So, I developed a Node.js service that parses web pages locally and stores them in an SQLite FTS for full-text search. I deployed the service using Docker on my NAS.

3. To enhance my learning experience, I also developed an annotation feature that allows me to make notes and annotations directly on the offline HTML. For good articles, I save them to read slowly over time.

4. Gradually, the app gained some users. Since they were not familiar with Docker, I wrapped it with Electron and developed a standalone desktop version. The desktop version and Docker version use CRDT for peer-to-peer synchronization.

5. Some users provided feedback that it was inconvenient to annotate after saving, so I developed an open-source browser extension. Users can now annotate web pages directly in the browser, and the annotations and snapshots are saved automatically. When visiting the page again in the future, previous annotations can be restored.

Re: Pocket gets worse the more you use it (2019)

#69

Pocket isn’t a bookmark database, it is a tool for saving things to read later. The user interface is primarily built for reading, not organizing. I use Pocket extensively for reading, but I use Raindrop separately for organizing and managing content that I want to archive for future access with proper search, filtering, and categorization. To me, these apps serve separate functions and need different user interfaces…

With the exception of syncing the list between devices (a feature I personally can't imagine myself needing or wanting, though I can definitely see why others would), these things are basically what tabs are for. You open things up in tabs to read them later, and you can also search tabs (a feature supported by firefox, at least, not sure about other browsers) and categorize them (their order and grouping into separate windows). Tabs also have the benefit of being extremely convenient, whereas there's a whole lot more friction involved in using any other option, like bookmarks, or things like pocket.

Re: Pocket gets worse the more you use it (2019)

#70

FWIW, for my current methodology, I capture the text - often from a Tranquility Reader version of the page - and then apply a macro in Notepad++ that removes 90% of the remaining junk. Then save it to a text file.

My biggest software related wish is to have notepad++ on macos. It's far and away better than anything else.
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