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) -- http://harvey.nu/applescript_url_encode_routine.html
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