Speak Instapaper Posts — Part 1

I saw this in my Twitter stream the other day:

You know what I want? A text-to-speech plugin for @instapaper so, while commuting to/from work, I can listen to the stuff I find at work.

— @seankaiser

That shouldn’t be too hard, shouldn’t it?

First we have to get the unread articles from Instapaper. If you go instapaper, log in, and go to your unread articles, you can see the RSS button in the URL field in Safari. To get to the RSS feed in Automator, do the following:

• Open Automator, create a new Workflow
• Open www.instapaper.com/u in Safari and drag the link from the URL bar to the empty Automator Workflow window. Automator will create an new “Get Specified URLs” action with the Instapaper URL unread in it
• Add a “Get Feeds from URLs” action next
• Add a “Get Link URLs from Articles” action. Unselect the “only in the same domain” option
• Finally add the “New Safari Documents” action.
• The workflow already does something useful. Save as “Open unread Instapaper articles”

If you ares anything like me this workflow will open quite a large number of pages. I think Instapaper limits the RSS feed to 25. That’s still a lot of new Safari tabs/windows you are opening there. We want to add an action that restricts the number of items passed through it. Surprisingly there is none in the default actions, but this is fairly easy to add. Insert a new “Run AppleScript” action before the “New Safari Documents” action and replace the default code with the following:

on run {input, parameters}
	
	set maxNum to 3
	-- filters all but the first maxNum items from the articles, change as appropriate
	-- enter '-1' or remove this action entirely to get all urls
	if (count of input) > maxNum then
		set output to items 1 through maxNum of input
	else
		set output to input
	end if
	
	return output
end run

This will only pass through the first maxNum of items passed into it, regardless of type. You can change maxNum to fit your taste and/or needs. You can also set maxNum to -1 if you want to pass all items without removing the AppleScript action.

Save again and try running it. The next step will be to filter the actual text out of the web page which will be a little tougher and the main topic of Part 2.