Using pocket without webviews
26 Feb 2015I'm using Pocket a lot. Whenever I find an interesting link, I add it to pocket to read it later. Then, whenever I have to take the subway, or wait in a queue, I read the latest articles I added.
Pocket delivers a nice uncluttered API that lets you focus on what you're reading, and remember where you were in an article so you can easily continue where you left off.
Unfortunatly, this does not work when Pocket has to fallback to its webview mode. Sometimes, when a page is not correctly formatted, Pocket can't convert it.
More often than not, this made me stop reading the article altogether. But I recently found a trick to help Pocket into converting the file.
Markdown to the rescue
I love markdown. I write my blog posts in markdown because I love its simplicity.
What I did is convert the page I want to add to Pocket to markdown, then upload this page online to a service that will convert it back to html. I'm actually only doing a html > markdown > html conversion, and it just works.
You first need to grab your file (wget), than convert it to markdown (I personnaly use this python script). The final step is simply to upload it to a service that can format markdown, like NoteHub or GitHub Gists. And finally add this page to pocket.
Hope that helped. It made me able to add this sed page using this gist.
Want to add something ? Feel free to get in touch on Twitter : @pixelastic