Discourse users are discussing the possibility of integrating Pocket, an offline reader app, with the platform. erlend_sh initially reported a successful, albeit imperfect, experience using Pocket with Discourse, noting that it stores the entire page offline, but has issues with width and doesn’t include pages that haven’t been loaded. cregox tried using Pocket with Discourse but was unsuccessful, suggesting that the feature would be a great use for the long-discussed print feature. erlend_sh suggested emailing Pocket to explore compatibility options, such as using the Discourse API. codinghorror proposed recognizing Pocket’s user-agent to serve it paginated content, similar to what is served to Google’s crawlers.
Note: This is more of an observation than a request.
I prefer to do long-form reading on my tablet, and today I actually encountered a post that met this criteria. I decided to see what “add to pocket” would do.
It appears when Pocket encounters pages that it doesn’t recognise as an article, it simply stores the entire page offline. In Discourse’s case, that means the no-JS version, and any pages you haven’t loaded in will not be included, so I only got the #15-#34 range for instance, which makes sense.
Worked quite nicely actually, except the width is a bit off. I’ve sent them an e-mail to see if they’re interested in lending a hand for better compatibility.
On my brief test, it simply didn’t work. At least with the pocket mac client. I also tried adding .rss and .json to it, but oddly pocket didn’t like them as well. It would have been nice!
I could find no way around it. Even offcourse doesn’t seem to work. Pocket is tough!
Send them an e-mail asking to make Pocket compatible with Discourse. There should be many avenues they could explore, like using the Discourse API, or scraping the no-JS version.
If we recognize Pocket’s user-agent, we could add it to the web crawler list – then it would get 1996 paginated content, at least, the same kind we serve to Google’s crawlers.
