Instapaper Service Fully Restored

After suffering from an extended outage on Wednesday, February 9 at 12:30PM PT through Thursday, February 10 at 7:30PM PT, we brought the Instapaper service back up with limited access to archives as a short-term solution while we worked to restore the service completely.

Today at 1AM PT we completely restored the Instapaper service, including access to all archives. We performed the restoration without losing any of your older articles, changes made to more recent articles or articles saved after recovering from the outage.

We apologize for the extended downtime and the time it took to regain access to your complete archives. Instapaper has operated as a high availability service over the last nine years without many hiccups. The root cause of this outage was both difficult to predict and prevent, and the nature of the outage is extremely rare and unlikely to recur. We appreciate your patience during this time.

We’d like to thank the Pinterest Site Reliability Engineering team for guiding us through the recovery, and the Amazon Relational Database Service team for working with us throughout the weekend to dramatically expedite the recovery process.

Lastly, if you’re interested in a more detailed overview of the issue that caused the outage and our process to recover the service, you can learn more on our Engineering Blog.

– Instapaper Team

Instapaper Restored, Access to Archives Limited

As we shared earlier today, Instapaper is experiencing an extended outage. After 31 hours of downtime, we were able to rebuild a database instance to get Instapaper back online! In the interest of coming back up as soon as possible, this instance only has the last six weeks of articles. For now, anything you’ve saved since December 20, 2016 is accessible.

We’re working on getting the rest of your articles restored, but wanted to give you access to  your most recently saved articles in the meantime. Again, there hasn’t been any data loss. The full database exports are taking much longer than anticipated.

We’re aiming to get the full archives available by next Friday, February 17 at the latest. We appreciate your patience and understanding in the interim.

– Instapaper Team

Extended Outage

Yesterday, February 8th, at 12:30PM PT Instapaper suffered from an outage that has extended through this morning.

After spending multiple hours on the phone with our cloud service provider, it appears we hit a system limit for our hosted database that’s preventing new articles from being saved. At this time, our only option is to export all data from our old database and import it into a new one. We expect the service to be fully recovered today, February 9.

We pride ourselves on being a reliable service with minimal downtime (we were up for 99.93% of 2016), and know many of you rely on Instapaper every day. We apologize that this issue has resulted in an extended period of downtime.

We assure you we haven’t lost any data. While you may not have been able to save articles during the outage, anything you’ve already saved to Instapaper is safe. We appreciate your patience while we work diligently to get it resolved.

- Instapaper Team

Introducing the Instapaper Firefox Extension

Today we’re launching an official Instapaper extension for Firefox!

We’ve been getting a lot of requests from Firefox users to build an extension to match the ones we offer for Chrome, Opera and Safari. Now, we’re happy to roll out the same great saving features for Firefox.

To install the new Firefox extension, open www.instapaper.com/save on Firefox or go to Mozilla’s Add-on page for Instapaper.

Like our other browser extensions, when you find an article or video you want to save, just tap or click once to save it to Instapaper. Other convenient features include:

A keyboard shortcut: A Ctrl+shift+S keyboard shortcut to save the article you’re currently viewing.

A right-click menu option: To save the current page–or any link on the current page–we added an “Instapaper” option to the right-click menu.

More Instapaper save buttons: Now you can “Save to Instapaper” directly from Twitter and Hacker News. Alongside each tweet containing a URL or a Hacker News post, you’ll now see an inline Instapaper save button.

Saving directly to folders: Once your save is confirmed, click the folder icon on the save overlay to direct the article right into one of your folders.

Toggle options: The keyboard shortcut and inline saving options can be toggled on/off.

If you’ve got any questions or feedback, just let us know via support@help.instapaper.com or @InstapaperHelp on Twitter.

– Instapaper Team

Instapaper Premium is now free for everyone

Today we’re making Instapaper Premium available to all Instapaper users, free of charge. Instapaper Premium is the best way to experience all that Instapaper has to offer, and we’re excited to open it up to everyone.

Before, some of our greatest features were limited to Instapaper Premium subscribers. Now that we’re better resourced, we’re able to offer everyone the best version of Instapaper. Starting today, all users will have access to:

• An ad-free Instapaper website
• Full-text search for all articles
• Unlimited Notes
• Text-to-speech playlists
• Unlimited speed reading
• “Send to Kindle” via bookmarklet and mobile apps
• Kindle Digests of up to 50 articles

For existing Instapaper Premium users, we’ll offer prorated refunds for your current subscription, and you’ll no longer be billed for Instapaper Premium. Thanks for your support throughout the years, we appreciate it.

All users will continue to have an ad-free Instapaper app experience, and we’re eliminating ads on the web entirely.

Opening Instapaper Premium is something we’ve always wanted to do, and we’re thrilled to give everyone the very best Instapaper experience. If you’ve got any questions or feedback, just let us know via support@help.instapaper.com or @InstapaperHelp on Twitter.

– Instapaper Team

Introducing a new search experience for iOS

Earlier this year, we rebuilt our search backend as a first step in making search on Instapaper faster and easier to scale. Today, we’re launching a completely overhauled search experience on iOS, which is now available to all users on Instapaper version 7.2.

Search in half the taps

The new search comes with big improvements and is accessible directly at the top of your article list (without having to go through the side menu). Just scroll up on the article list to reveal the search bar.

Local search for everyone

Once you tap the search bar, you’ll see an option to search either your current section (e.g. Home) or All Articles. Everyone can search by title in the current section, regardless of connectivity. If you’re an Instapaper Premium subscriber, the All Articles tab provides you access to full-text search.

Manage articles in search results

In addition to filtering results by section, you can also manage your articles in search results. Swipe across any article entry in search for options including  “move to a folder”, “archive”, “delete” or “share”.

Open search results in reader view

Previously, articles in search results would open within the in-app browser. Now, if you open an article from search results, you’ll stay in the Instapaper app–even if the article isn’t stored on your device–and have access to all Instapaper reader features.

Other improvements

This release also has several fixes and improvements based on your feedback, including support for iOS10. If you have any questions, feature requests or issues you’d like us to sort out, please reach out to support@help.instapaper.com or @InstapaperHelp on Twitter. We love hearing from our users, and we thank you for choosing Instapaper!

– Instapaper Team

Instapaper is joining Pinterest

Today, we’re excited to announce that Instapaper is joining Pinterest. In the three years since betaworks acquired Instapaper from Marco Arment, we’ve completely rewritten our backend, overhauled our mobile and web clients, improved parsing and search, and introduced tons of great features like highlights, text-to-speech, and speed reading to the product.

All of these features and developments revolved around the core mission of Instapaper, which is allowing our users to discover, save, and experience interesting web content. In that respect, there is a lot of overlap between Pinterest and Instapaper. Joining Pinterest provides us with the additional resources and experience necessary to achieve that shared mission on a much larger scale.

Instapaper provides a compelling source for news-based content, and we’re excited to take those learnings to Pinterest’s discovery products. We’ll also be experimenting with using our parsing technology for certain Rich Pin types.

For you, the Instapaper end user and customer, nothing changes. The Instapaper team will be moving from betaworks in New York City to Pinterest’s headquarters in San Francisco, and we’ll continue to make Instapaper a great place to save and read articles.

As we focus on the future of the user experience, we’ll be sunsetting our developer product, Instaparser. Starting today, we will cease signups for Instaparser and halt billing for existing customers. In order to ensure a smooth transition for current users, we will keep Instaparser running until November 1, 2016.

Lastly, and most importantly, we want to thank all of our readers for your support throughout the years. Whether you supported us back when Marco built and ran Instapaper, from the betaworks acquisition, or just found out about us recently, we truly appreciate your continued support and look forward to bringing you the same great product at Pinterest.

If you have any questions at all, please reach out to us at support@help.instapaper.com

- Instapaper Team

New and Improved Search

For a while now, some of the most consistent feature requests we’ve gotten from users have involved improvements to Instapaper’s full-text search engine. For months now, the existing search infrastructure had been stretched to its current limits. In order to continue scaling and implement a lot of the features you’ve been requesting, we needed to completely rebuild our search infrastructure.

Today, we’re very excited to launch the new search infrastructure, which is the first of several steps in what we intend to be a complete overhaul of Instapaper’s search feature. For Instapaper Premium customers, the most noticeable difference will be query speed. We’ve improved the speed of search queries by 6x on average, and far better on certain cases. Additionally, we’ve implemented a handful of new features in the search engine.

• Sorting Options: The previous search engine only returned results sorted by most recent. The new search engine defaults to a “Relevance” sort, with the options to sort by “Newest” and “Oldest” as well.
  
• Title Searches: The new full-text search automatically searches article titles, along with the complete text of the article.
• Exact Matches: By putting a search query around quotes, you can search for an exact phrase.
• Site and Author Filtering: We’ve implemented an “Advanced Search” option that allows you to filter by domain name (e.g., nytimes.com) and author.
• Paged Results: Previously, searches were limited to only the 50 most-recent matching results. With the new search, you can page through all of the search results.
• Multi-Language Support: Instapaper has users from all over the world, however, the previous search only supported queries with English characters. The new search engine supports queries in all languages.
  

Rebuilding the backend for Instapaper’s full-text search is the first (and most complicated) step in our overhaul for search. Some of the features listed above like paged results, sorting options, and advanced search options are only available on instapaper.com at launch. However, we will also be reimplementing search on iOS and Android, which will bring the full functionality to those platforms.

If you have any feedback on the new search or have any particular features you’d like us to keep in mind as we continue our revamp of search, we’d love to hear from you @InstapaperHelp on Twitter or via email at support@help.instapaper.com. Thanks, as always, for using Instapaper!

Instapaper Weekly Sponsorship

Update 8/29/2016: Since Instapaper is now a Pinterest product we no longer offer sponsorships for Instapaper Weekly. Thanks to all of our previous sponsors!

We’re excited to announce that we’ll be opening up sponsorship slots for our Instapaper Weekly email.

About Instapaper Weekly

Instapaper Weekly is an algorithmically-generated newsletter delivered every Sunday. The email contains the most popular highlight created by all Instapaper users for the week, and a list of the most popular articles saved to Instapaper for each day of the past week.

The Weekly is currently delivered to about 1.5 million Instapaper users. The open rate for the weekly email is 17% and the click-through rate is about 2.7%.

Why Sponsorships?

By design, the Instapaper Weekly is a reflection of what our readers consider to be the most important and noteworthy topics for a given week. Sponsoring the Weekly places your content amongst the best content Instapaper has to offer and provides access to a large, engaged audience of tech-oriented and well-read professionals.

Sponsoring

As the Weekly compiles content our users found most compelling, we will be holding our sponsorship choices to the same standards of high quality. Your sponsored content should fit within our existing format for Instapaper Weekly and consist of a link, title, description, and thumbnail image. Ideally, the link would be something that our mobile-centric users can save to Instapaper for later reading.

We will run the sponsorship between the “Top Highlight” and “Most Popular” sections of the weekly email:

If you’d like to sponsor Instapaper Weekly, please send us an email to sponsors@instapaper.com.

Thanks,
Instapaper Team

Instaparser API

Today, we’re very excited to announce the launch of the Instaparser API. Instaparser is a new API that gives developers access to the same parsing tools we use for the Instapaper service.

Since the launch of our new parser in January, we’ve gotten lots of inquiries from developers about using our parser for third-party applications. With the new Instaparser API, app developers can use our parsing tools to provide users with a lightning-fast browsing experience optimized for mobile devices. Data scientists can use the tools to normalize input for text analysis. And hackers can do, well, whatever hackers might like to do with lightning-fast access to clean, standardized web page data.

The Instaparser service offers three APIs, with more to follow in the coming months:

• The Article API is a comprehensive parse of all body text, images, and videos associated with the content. This is the API Instapaper uses to optimize how websites are displayed on mobile devices.
• The Text API extracts just the body text of the page, which is particularly useful for natural language processing, sentiment analysis, and other text-based analysis.
• The Document API lets you upload your HTML directly to parse content that isn’t publicly viewable or is behind a paywall.
  

Access to all three of the above APIs is included in all of the Instaparser plans, which are tiered to accommodate different volume requirements. In addition to our free trial, we offer three plans:

• Beta Plan: $99/month for 100,000 calls per month with a rate limit of 5 calls per second.
  
• Live Plan: $399/month for 500,000 calls per month with a rate limit of 25 calls per second.
  
• Scale Plan: $699/month for 1 million calls per month with a rate limit of 50 calls per second.

There is no long-term commitment required, so you can change plans or cancel at any time.

A full overview of each plan is available at the Instaparser Plans page. If you’d like to try out Instaparser for free, sign up for our Trial plan. If you need larger capacity and service level agreements for the Instaparser service, please contact us at support@instaparser.com.

Instaparser is already in use by Fast Forward Labs, Dexter, Digg, and, of course, Instapaper. We’re excited to open the API to everyone to see what you’ll build. If you have any questions, comments, or concerns please feel free to reach us at support@instaparser.com or comment below.

- Instapaper Team