It’s been a few good years since the last time you heard from me. I’m not dead yet!
Here’s what I’ve been up to. Some of these updates are recent and some are more than a year old that I haven’t even told you about yet:
Send to Kindle and Exports
- This has been around for a little while but doesn’t show up unless you activate in settings: go to Settings and add your “Send-to-Kindle email address”. This will activate an option in the Export menu when on an article. “Send to Kindle” will package up the article you’re on and, well, send it to your Kindle. This is great for offline reading or for reading long articles on the beach. This also now works with PDFs. So if you have the URL to a PDF saved, Paperback will send the PDF document to your Kindle, as long as it’s not too big.
- Also in the Export menu, you have options to view the article content as markdown and to download a Word doc of the article.
Improved Selection and Visual Highlights
This is a long requested featured!
- Now, when you select text and add to notes, either using the “Add to
Notes” button or the shortcut t, the text will be visually
highlighted in the article.
- This works by string matching lines of text from the notes field
also called “description” in Pinboard. There’s also a new setting where
you can optionally prepend an added selection with a
>, like a quote in markdown or email. This might help you differentiate selections from your own notes.
- This works by string matching lines of text from the notes field
also called “description” in Pinboard. There’s also a new setting where
you can optionally prepend an added selection with a
- Along with this feature, the “Add to Notes” button is positioned close to the text you’ve highlighted when on desktop. The button is also less likely to stay in view when you no longer have selected text, which annoyed me.
Other Fixes and Improvement
- This one I’m embarrassed about: the tag syncing bug. This was first reported many years ago. I was able to reproduce it but couldn’t quite figure out what was going on. I had taken a few attempts at it over the years and finally solved it. Like a lot of bugs, it ended up being something stupid which I don’t need to divulge but tags should be fully working (for the first time).
- Greatly improved sync times for people with a lot of articles
- Set wider reading layouts for both the Large and Huge reading widths so that articles aren’t so tight at those sizes
- Updated site configurations for better parsing of articles
- Added shortcuts { and } for “Archive and go to Previous” and “Archive and go to Next” respectively
- Improved alerts and error notification in various scenarios
What’s Next
A couple other feature I’d like to tackle next are: optionally displaying tags in the reading list then being able to filter your reading list by a tag, and exporting to PDF.
Like I mentioned when I started Paperback, it’s more of a hobby project for me than a business so far, so fixes and features come at a hobbyist’s pace. While sometimes I feel sad that I haven’t done more development on Paperback in the last several years, what I’ve done in my life during that time has been incredible. I’ve fallen in love, got married, and traveled the world!
It seems to me that we’re increasingly controlled by the work we do and the platforms we use. Instead, we should be using our work, hobbies, and platforms to enrich our lives, not be beholden by them. I’m proud that Paperback fits like a puzzle piece into my life. It is shaped by my life, rather than it shaping me.
Until next time,
—Nick