Save Safari tabs to Instapaper
I posted a way to save your Safari tabs to Evernote, which I’ve found is generally a great way to save bookmarks. It syncs automatically to your other computers and your iPhone, and it’s fast and easy. If you really want to highlight a few tabs to make sure you get back to them, you might consider this script, though. Once you’ve saved your entire Safari browsing session for later, close everything except for those special urls, run the code below as a script, and your open tabs will be saved as entries in your InstaPaper account.
There are two “property” lines at the top of the script; edit them to set your Instapaper username and password (if you have one, otherwise, set it to ""). The next section handles everything, iterating through each tab, grabbing its title and url and building a shell command to do a simple curl call to the InstaPaper API.
After that, the rest of the script is a routine for url encoding that I nicked here. It’s called when setting both the _title and _url variables to make the curl call from the shell work. I haven’t tested this extensively yet, but it’s worked for everything I’ve tried. A title with odd characters in it could potentially cause problems. You can always add a shell-escaping routine…
property _user : "yourusername" property _pass : "yourpassword" tell application "Safari" repeat with _tab in tabs of front window set _title to my urlencode(name of _tab) set _url to my urlencode(URL of _tab) set _script to (¬ "curl 'https://www.instapaper.com/api/add?username="¬ & _user & "&password=" & _pass & "&url=" & _url & "&title=" & _title & "'") set output to do shell script _script end repeat end tell on urlencode(theText) set theTextEnc to "" repeat with eachChar in characters of theText set useChar to eachChar set eachCharNum to ASCII number of eachChar if eachCharNum = 32 then set useChar to " " else if (eachCharNum ≠ 42) and (eachCharNum ≠ 95) and¬ (eachCharNum < 45 or eachCharNum > 46) and (eachCharNum < 48 or eachCharNum > 57)¬ and (eachCharNum < 65 or eachCharNum > 90) and (eachCharNum < 97 or eachCharNum > 122) then set firstDig to round (eachCharNum / 16) rounding down set secondDig to eachCharNum mod 16 if firstDig > 9 then set aNum to firstDig 55 set firstDig to ASCII character aNum end if if secondDig > 9 then set aNum to secondDig 55 set secondDig to ASCII character aNum end if set numHex to ("%" & (firstDig as string) & (secondDig as string)) as string set useChar to numHex end if set theTextEnc to theTextEnc & useChar as string end repeat return theTextEnc end urlencode
Just what I was looking for, thanks! And I found Instapaper Beyond while I was here and am diggin’ that too :-)