Today’s guest blogger is Matthew Graff, JD, MLIS.  Matt lives in upstate New York with his lovely wife, Kimberly, and their two cats, Pumpkin and Hamilton.

As a proud Gen X’er I get a lot of my news and info from Internet news sources.  With the massive amount of information available to me, content organization tools make my online time more efficient and pleasant.  Two of those tools that help streamline my online experience are Readability and Instapaper.

Instapaper

While online, I frequently find and receive links to pages that I would love to look at, just not at that particular time.  A number of quick, dirty, and ultimately unsatisfying solutions are available for this problem, including: leaving the links open in separate tabs until an opportunity to read presents itself; emailing the links to yourself; or bookmarking the pages.  But each of these fixes presents problems of confusion, disorganization, and clutter.  Enter Instapaper (http://www.instapaper.com/).  Instapaper is a free application that provides subscribers with the means to save webpages in a neat and organized fashion for later viewing. A  quick, easy, and painless installation places a link, “Read Later”, in the bookmark toolbar.  Clicking on that “Read Later” link saves a page to your Instapaper account.   Accessing your Instapaper account page reveals a record (list) of your saved content as well as a link to read those pages at your convenience.  Instapaper offers a number of ways to manage your saved pages, but some highlights include: an option to load a text-only version of your saved page, the ability to archive your content or export it to a folder, as well as to edit and delete an entry. Oh yeah, Instapaper is also available for your iPhone as well.

Readability

Unfortunately reading all those saved pages is often a less-than-pleasant experience.  Filled with links that open pop-ups when moused-over, distracting side columns, and annoying adds and animation, the online article format can usually be described as, and  I’m being charitable here, the dogs breakfast.  But there is a fix available to deal with this issue.  Readability (http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/) is a free and powerful online tool that strips the extraneous info from your articles and renders them in a simple text format for easy reading.  Similar to Instapaper, installation is a breeze and place a “Readability” link in your bookmark toolbar.  Clicking on that “Readability” link reloads your page in a clear and easy-to-read format.  Readability offers a fair degree of customization as well, including the option to change font type and size, article format, and margin size, as well as the ability to print content in Readability’s new, neat format.

Used in tandem, Instapaper and Readability are a powerful combination of tools that may improve your online information retrieval and consumption experience.  If you spend time online and run into problems of the sort listed above, give these programs a shot.