Comments on: Offline AskMe reading with iPod/iPhone?

Question: Offline AskMe reading with iPod/iPhone?

Napoleonic Terrier — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 19:45:20 -0800

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?

By: idleminded

idleminded — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 19:51:08 -0800

Instapaper may be up your alley. Haven't tried it with Ask Metafilter specifically, but it's worth a shot.

By: gomess

gomess — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 19:57:35 -0800

rss feed + byline app

By: Brainy

Brainy — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 22:55:24 -0800

Net News Wire. You'll have to load it up with signal but once they're downloaded, it should work.

By: nuke3ae

nuke3ae — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 02:22:30 -0800

Seems like some sort of offline rss app would be the way to go.

By: schwab

schwab — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 02:55:56 -0800

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.

By: cmyr

cmyr — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 02:57:00 -0800

I use Netnewswire, you just have to make sure you refresh the feed before heading out.

By: Brettus

Brettus — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 06:49:40 -0800

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?

By: Tu13es

Tu13es — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 08:11:42 -0800

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.

By: hydrophobic

hydrophobic — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 09:21:28 -0800

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.

By: hydrophobic

hydrophobic — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 09:55:17 -0800

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.