Offline AskMe reading with iPod/iPhone?

March 24, 2009 7:45 PM

Using an iPod Touch, is there a way to automatically download the latest 50 (or some preset number) Ask MetaFilter questions and answers for off-line reading on the Touch?
posted by Napoleonic Terrier to computers & internet (10 comments total)

Instapaper may be up your alley. Haven't tried it with Ask Metafilter specifically, but it's worth a shot.
posted by idleminded at 7:51 PM on March 24

rss feed + byline app
posted by gomess at 7:57 PM on March 24

Net News Wire. You'll have to load it up with signal but once they're downloaded, it should work.
posted by Brainy at 10:55 PM on March 24

Seems like some sort of offline rss app would be the way to go.
posted by nuke3ae at 2:22 AM on March 25

Byline is great - it's the only iPod Touch app I've paid for and I'd do it again. Just open a Google Reader account and add the ask.metafilter.com rss feed. Byline will not only download the question like a normal feed reader, but it will actually archive the website behind the rss post so you can read the answers as well.
posted by schwab at 2:55 AM on March 25

I use Netnewswire, you just have to make sure you refresh the feed before heading out.
posted by cmyr at 2:57 AM on March 25

The other suggestions will work, I just want to say that I think a Metafilter App would be the bees knees. Any Touch/iPhone developers out there?
posted by Brettus at 6:49 AM on March 25

Re: the above suggestions regarding RSS, the RSS feed only displays the questions, not answers. However, each question has its own RSS feed, so there would probably be a way to script something to grab the RSS feeds from the last 50 questions in the RSS feed. I'm not sure how to do that, though.
posted by Tu13es at 8:11 AM on March 25

If your up for learning something new, I'm sure you could probably mash the RSS feeds together with Yahoo Pipes. A quick search over there shows a few MetaFilter pipes already setup that might be useful as a starting point: This one gets just the latest entry from each of the MetaFilter feeds and aggregates them into a single view.

I've not used it, but heard it's pretty powerful and coupled with NetNewsWire might get close to what you're looking for.
posted by hydrophobic at 9:21 AM on March 25

OK, so I got interested and had a play around. It needs someone to clean it up a bit (perhaps collect answers and append them to the question?), but this pipe will aggregate all the latest questions and answers into a straight-up feed. Read it from top to bottom and it should work. You could then subscribe in any iPhone RSS reader to follow it.
posted by hydrophobic at 9:55 AM on March 25