batchtapaper

Got a long list of URLs that you need to get into your Instapaper account? Batchtapaper is probably what you're looking for.

You'll often encounter things like Byliner's wonderful curated end-of-year lists of articles. I want to read all of them, but I don't want to have to add each one of them to my Instapaper account manually; so, I use Batchtapaper.

You can install batchtapaper using RubyGems:

% gem install batchtapaper

The simplest way to use batchtapaper is to point it at a file containing some URLs:

% batchtapaper /path/to/urls.txt

Enter your Instapaper username and password when prompted, and it should fly away and add them one-by-one to your account.

The text file you pass to batchtapaper should have one URL on each line, like so:

http://example.com/article
http://blog.example.org/2013/01/foo

However, you can also specify titles if you wish by separating them from the URLs with a tab:

http://example.com/article	An Article
http://blog.example.org/2013/01/foo	A blog post

If you use batchtapaper quite a lot, one of the first things you'll want to do is to create an ~/.instapaperrc file containing your authentication details. All you need to do is put your username/email address on the first line and your password — if you have one — on the second, like so:

foo@example.com
p4ssw0rd

It's worth setting this file's permissions to 400 if you share your computer with anyone else.

batchtapaper will also accept input from STDIN, which means that you can use it in an ordinary chain of commands. If you've got something that spits out URLs, then simply pipe that output into batchtapaper and it will process them all:

cat urls.txt | batchtapaper