Simple Instapaper Integration

Tech
1

General idea taken from aamaras’ guide. I’m using it to track articles I’ve read and put into archive on Instapaper.

Steps:

  1. Go to your Instapaper archive.
  2. Right click and click view page source.
  3. Find the link along the lines of < link rel=“alternate” type=“application/rss+xml” title=“RSS” href=“/archive/rss/1234567/longrandomstringofnumbersandletters” />. I did ctrl-f and searched for RSS.
  4. Copy the link from the href and put insapaper.com in front of it, eg. http://www.instapaper.com/archive/rss/1234567/longrandomstringofnumbersandletters
  5. Create a new do more goal that uses the RSSminder integration.
  6. Paste in your link from above and finish making the goal.
  7. Voila

You now have a beeminder goal that tracks new articles that you read and put into archive on Instapaper! It even automatically puts the article title into the datapoint for you!

Let me know if you need any clarification or if it doesn’t work for you!

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2

I want to second this, with pocket shutting down recently I was looking for an alternative and this technique worked well. The only note I have is that for some reason the first article I marked “read” was not recorded by RSS minder - it might have been because I did it too soon after setting up the integration :frowning:, but apart from that one day 1 hiccup it works perfectly. Mostly mentioning it in case someone else sets it up and gets worried that their first article didn’t get counted…

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3

Turns out the “day 1 hiccup” is actually a bigger deal than I thought: the instapaper RSS feed that @japancolorado used has a publication date for each article, which is the date you saved it into instapaper (I imported my instapaper from my pocket queue, and the pocket saved dates carried over), not the date you read it, or the date the article was published.

I was having issues with archived articles being reflected inconsistently in my beeminder and was on an emergency day and ended up in touch with support asking what was wrong with the integration, because I couldn’t see my RSS feed URL in the goal to check on it myself.

@Bethany_M_Soule worked out that because the RSS integration ignores all datapoints published before the goal was created, it wasn’t “giving me credit” for reading any articles that I saved before creating the goal.

So the goal only works for logging articles that I saved after creating it, and given I have some articles that are 2 years old, it’s not a perfect solution unless The Powers The Bee can work out a good workaround (changing the goal start date didn’t work; unsure if they can change the goal creation date).

Thought I’d add these learnings to the forum in case anyone else runs into this confusing issue.

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4

Still having problems with it, for which I’ve sent another support ticket.

It appears that it’s not about the datapoints being published before the goal was created because I wasn’t able to have blog posts I saved to instapaper 3 weeks ago show up in the beeminder graph, even though by the logic we landed on they should.

But a dummy article I saved and then immediately archived for testing purposes did show up in the graph.

I’ll post an update when we get one but it’s looking like this RSS feed isn’t going to be a viable solution for beeminding instapaper.

5

I’ve been looking into this, and although I couldn’t find documentation on Instapaper’s own website on their RSS feed, the internet’s opinion is that the in the RSS feed is indeed the date that the article was added, not the date you read it.

Here’s a typical RSS feed from Instapaper:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<rss version="2.0" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
<channel>
<title>Instapaper: Archive</title>
<link>https://www.instapaper.com/archive</link>
<description></description>

<item>
<guid>https://loremipsum.substack.com/p/book-review-latin</guid>
<title>Book Review: Lorem Ipsum</title>
<link>https://loremipsum.substack.com/p/book-review-latin</link>
<description>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat.…</description>

<pubDate>Sun, 09 Nov 2025 07:13:54 GMT</pubDate>
</item>


<item>
<guid>https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/the-bad-news-ai-is-going-pretty-much</guid>
<title>The bad news: AI is going pretty much as I expected</title>
<link>https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/the-bad-news-ai-is-going-pretty-much</link>
<description>ChatGPT-5, “Draw Sam Altman with three arms, sweeping the word scaling under a rug” A brief update: Some battles no longer need fighting. The notion on which…</description>

<pubDate>Sat, 06 Sep 2025 05:51:21 GMT</pubDate>
</item>

</channel>
</rss>

So we see a from months ago showing up, I think because the article has just been read. Because the Beeminder integration filters out anything with a older than a week ago, and things only appear in the RSS feed when they’re read, then that means you’d have to both add and read an article within the past week for Beeminder’s integration to know about it.

There doesn’t seem to be a neat solution to this. Beeminder needs to de-dupe the feed, to ensure we’re not giving you double credit for things that you’ve already read, and we’d normally do that by date-of-action, but we don’t have a field for that. We’d have to de-dupe on or something, which would mean storing a (hash of) all the values you’ve ever read, and that’s just not practical.

There is a documented API for instapaper itself, so that may have a better solution in there, but I’ve not dug into it. Right now, I can’t recommend an RSS-based solution.

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6

Yeah, I think the solution to this is that this RSS feed doesn’t work effectively with beeminder and you therefore don’t support it. It’s a pity as I liked the pocket integration, but oh well! I can always make a manual goal if I want.

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