William Reardon’s Blog

Like a lot of folks, I use a ‘toread’ tag on del.icio.us to keep track of things I want to read, but just don’t have the time.

The other day I noticed I currently had 270 items to read, the oldest going back to ~2005.

Clearly my eyes were bigger than my stomach. Er, than my eyes. Wait… nevermind.

Anyway.

Oddly the best time to catch is up on Online reading is when I’m offline. Specifically, when I’m on a long plane ride.

Instead of waiting for the airlines to figure out the whole Internet-on-a-plane thing, and since I have some pretty long flights coming up myself, I decided to hack something together using Perl & wget. After all, wget does a lot of the heavy lifting already, so really it should be just a matter of gluing wget together with delicious.

With that, I give you mirror-toread.pl.

You can run it as

./mirror-toread.pl <username> <password>

It’ll take a while to run the first time, as it throttles requests to 1/second.

Afterwards, you should have an index.html & a ‘Toread’ directory containing whatever you’ve tagged with ‘toread’.

I should mention a pretty gnarly hack, done in an hour or so. It ain’t pretty. And it ain’t perfect.

I had wanted to find the “next” link for articles paginated, but I realized it’s be easier to bookmark the “print” version in the future. Video and the like isn’t handled well. And so on.

But hopefully it’s good enough. We’ll find out next week when I head to Europe (where the history comes from).

This entry was posted on Friday, February 22nd, 2008 at 11:31 pm and is filed under nerd-ness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.