Ebook of my blog archive

I love Pocket, especially now that it can read articles out loud. However, it doesn’t do so well with code samples, which are like prose but can’t be reformatted. I still put programming articles away in Pocket, but I can never read them on my phone like prose articles. I figured that my Kindle Keyboard might handle them a bit better, so I started looking for ways to pull articles out of Pocket to make a nice little ebook out of them.

        Calibre’s old Read It Later recipe doesn’t seem to do anything except pull your most recent articles, so that doesn’t allow me to choose specific ones (it may or may not allow filtering by tag in the future). As it turns out, crofflr works quite well if I’m willing to tag articles I want to send (among supporting other services)… but I’m super lazy and I really like Pocket as a dumping ground rather than a structured thing I maintain.

        Somehow, eventually, I discovered Readlists which seems more or less perfect. I realize that it takes more effort than just tagging articles, but I kind of like that I can keep the list forever and share it with others. Maybe I’ll bundle up a bunch of Emacs Lisp articles, put them in a readlist, and then share it. If the articles were automatically pulled out, there’s less control over the theme of the resulting ebook - I could get an article about OOP, another about Emacs Lisp, and another about Haskell all after each other. Anyway, if you’ve ever wanted to make a plain-text ebook out of blog articles, Readlists is perfect for the job.

        Getting to the point, I’ve put all my posts tagged with “recap” into readlists. You can download them, if you like. Rediscover things I will in retrospect decide I shouldn’t have written! Follow my journey from the last year of high school to the present! Or just get inspired to give your own blog the same treatment. It works quite well, for something that’s free and takes just a few minutes.

• 2010: http://readlists.com/504fefd7
• 2011: http://readlists.com/562ec99d
• 2012: http://readlists.com/556cc6f0

        A note: I’m going to write a few more posts about 2012, and I’ll add them to the Readlist when I do. I figure, it’s about 2012 the year, not about things I wrote in 2012. Spoiler: 2012 was a pretty good year.