Readability app for now or later post reading.

If you are anything like I am, you encounter great articles on your Twitter feed, Facebook wall and Google plus feed all the time!  That’s not to mention any news feeds or blogs that you may subscribe to. Don’t you agree that we should never have to pass up on reading an article because we are too busy with work or otherwise unable to read it at the time when we discovered the piece.

The problem is that most of us work all day, as such we cannot read many of these posts when we see them during the day. Then there are those times when we have time to read but we have no wireless signal, such as when we are underground in subway. So what are we to do? Eventually you forget about the awesome post.

Well, I have a nice solution for this problem which can be used  either from your phone or on your computer. It’s an application/service called “Readability”. Readability is an awesome tool!  Here is a simple breakdown of what it does and how you use it:

Using Readability from your computer:

1. You go to their website, Readability.com and create a new account.

2. Once you create an account you log in and then you can add a little button to your browser for Readability. The button allows you to “Send to readability”, “Send to kindle” or “Read now”.

• 2.a. Send to readability basically takes the article and sends the content to the Readability application. You can then read it later on your pc or on your mobile device running the readability application. Yes, there is an awesome mobile app for this tool! More on that shortly.
• 2.b. Send to kindle does the same thing, but instead of to the app, it forwards the article content to your kindle. Sweet! This is a very cool feature to have for those of you that prefer to do your reading on the kindle.
• 2.c. Read now basically cleans up the article and allows you to read the post without all the noise from the website. ie: ads and so on. This is a nice feature for computer reading and is pretty useful, though honestly I don’t really use this method too much.

3. After you read the article, you can share it directly from Readability, keep it there for future reference, or simply delete it. I setup my Readability to post to my FB wall so that my friends can see the articles I am reading. Hopefully they join the conversation on their social media tool of choice, or via the comments section as a result. It’s all about engagement and interacting these days. Readability is just another great tool to help us in that aim.

Using Readability from your  mobile device:

1. Download and install the application from whatever device you are using. I’m positive that there are Android and Windows mobile client version, etc, but you’ll have to search that if you are on one of those “other” phones, I’m on an iphone.  *raises nose*  LOL.

2. You need an account to use Readability on the mobile app. I believe you can create one right from the app, but I’m not sure. You’ll just have to try it out or just create a username on the pc.

3. Sending your articles from a mobile is not as easy as it is on a pc, but it’s still a breeze once you get it. Apple never plays nice with other apps, I mean they have their own “Reader” on Safari, so why support Readability right? Anyway I have an Iphone, so the next series of steps is for Iphone users only. Android, and others, you’ll have to google this stuff yo. At worst, I’m sure you can use the web version of the app, though this doesn’t help much when underground.

• 3.a Simple, no brainer, yet tedious method to send your articles to Readability from IOS Safari. If you find an article that you like, open it up in safari, then copy the link of the post, open up Readability and it will autodetect that you have a URL link in the clipboard and ask if you want to send it to Readability. Say yes and voila it’s off to the app.
• 3.b Please note, some Iphone mobile apps play nice with Readability, I use tweetbot for twitter and I can send articles  directly from within the tweetbot app to Readability when I click on a link.
• 3.c The other more complex method requires creating a Bookmark link in IOS safari, then replacing the link with some javascript. It’s actually fairly simple and if you follow the steps on this link you could have it set up in a few minutes. I tested it and it seems to work well.

I hope this posts has introduced you to the awesome app called Readability and I hope you get to do more reading because of it. Let us know what you think of this app if you use it. Do you use or recommend another?