Reading List

I use Readability to bookmark all the articles I come across every day. Since I do not usually have time to sit down and read during the day, I read at night. Although, I prefer reading physical books to my laptop or phone screen. So, I decided to create books of all my articles per year. They would serve as reading list history and also ease the actual "reading" process.

Plan

Export all my bookmarks from Readability
Compile the content of all the articles into a book format
Create PDF for backup and print

Export

This was easy. Readbility just emails you a JSON document with all of your bookmark data. Or you can use their API to gather this information.

Compile

This was a bit more difficult. Since the export data did not include the article content, I had to "parse" the URL's for content. Luckily, Readability's API includes their parser also.

I wrote this simple node application to combine the article contents together into a HTML page:

//Create Reading List eBook
var readability = require('readability-api');
var async = require('async');

var articleUrls = require('./readability.json').bookmarks.map(function(article) {
	return article.article__url;
});

readability.configure({
	parser_token: '<API KEY>'
});

var parser = new readability.parser();

var html = '<!DOCTYPE html><html><head><meta charset="UTF-8"><link href="http://maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com/bootstrap/3.3.1/css/bootstrap.min.css" rel="stylesheet"><title>Reading Material 2014</title></head><body class="container">';

async.each(articleUrls, function(url, done) {
	parser.parse(url, function(err, article) {
		if (article) {
			html += '<article><h1>' + article.title + '</h1><p>' + article.content + '</p></article>';
		}
		done();
	});
}, function() {
	html += '</body></html>';
	console.log(html);
});

After creating and styling the HTML a bit, I used Google Chrome to print the page to PDF for me. I realize this could have been done within the node app also, but Chrome was quicker at the time.

Now each year I can have a digital history of what I read and have physical copies to fill my bookshelf with.