Posts Tagged ebook
The Inqy on your Kindle for Cheapskates [mashup]
After purchasing my Kindle yesterday, I began looking into ways to use it beyond the obvious ones. One feature that appeals to me is the chance to comfortably browse and read newspapers away from the computer and without fumbling with .. well,.. a newspaper.
Now, before I go any further let me tell you that I do not read the paper everyday, so I’m not willing to shell out even the paltry 12 bucks a month for digital subscriptions to the Inquirer and Daily News. Rather, I devised a mashup that grabs all the news from Philly.com in the past 24 hours and gets it on your Kindle easily and quickly.
The first tool I used was Calibre, a tool for managing ebooks and performing exactly what I was looking for: using a website to generate something of a “text podcast” for a site you want to read frequently. Unfortunately, Philly.com’s rss feed and website presented a few issues. For one, there’s no standard “print view” link, so the examples given on Calibre’s website would not work for obtaining a clutter free version of the article.
To overcome this, I used Instapaper‘s text viewing ability, which formats any webpage as text only. But there was another issue.. the rss feed had redirects and Instapaper wouldn’t render the articles from them. The links also only lead to the first page of each article, out of possibly many. Luckily, the final URLs were part of the false ones in the RSS feed, and the site allows for a viewAll URL flag which presents the entire article on one page.
The final solution: I wrote an ASP script to parse out those final links and rewrite the RSS feed in order to point each article at Instapaper’s viewer. Now by simply setting Calibre up to generate the news from http://www.brabbler.com/brabbler/customfeeds/philly.asp (see image below), you get (more or less) clean, full articles that are ready to drop onto your Kindle(or Nook or any other eReader) as you run out the door. Of course the content doesn’t exactly match the paper- this feed is based only on news as opposed to classifieds and such, but it should work well for the majority of people who just want the main bits.
Format AllRecipes for Kindle
If you’re a fan of cooking and a Kindle owner, you might appreciate this little utility that I wrote for my girlfriend today.
It takes a recipe from AllRecipes.com and formats it so that it can be easily read on a Kindle without pesky horizontal scrolling. The output it produces looks great with the Kindle(software version 2.5) set to “actual size”. There’s even a bookmarklet that will let you convert to Kindle format instantly with 1 click when you’re browsing AllRecipes.
Just use the bookmarklet on your favorite recipes and then use a utility to “print” to a PDF file, and drop it on your Kindle. I think it’s fairly straightforward. Any questions? Please leave a comment.
Also, I’m interested in how these PDFs work out on other devices. Feel free to post your experience and screenshots.
