Option to choose oldest or newest articles

[Molle]

Hello,

I have just started using Wordcycler. I tried Ephemera, and it worked
great, but after contacting the developer I was informed that
development had halted. I have a pretty large queue of Instapaper
articles and would like to read the oldest ones I have first. Can I do
this in any way myself? Otherwise, would you please consider adding
this option?

Great application!

Regards,
Molle

[James Sulak]

Hi Molle,

Thanks for your e-mail. Currently, there's no way to do that in Wordcycler.

Lately Wordcycler development has slowed, partly because I've been
busy with other projects, but also because I'm not yet sure what the
newly announced Instapaper API terms mean for the development of
Wordcycler. While the full API is certainly a boon, it requires that
all users be paid Instapaper subscribers. What Wordcycler does -
essentially scraping the site - is now technically forbidden, although
I've done my best to make Wordcycler a good citizen.

So what this means is that any future versions of Wordcycler will have
to use the full API, which is a not insignificant amount of work. I
haven't decided how/if I will proceed from here.

Thanks,

James

[John Nesler]

May I make a brief counterargument as to why scraping the site as you
have been is a practice that is reasonable to continue with?

1) You're making no profit.
2) You're not abusing the resources of Instapaper. You're not using
their servers and computing power to create the mobi or ePub files.
They are being used by your program as a source for links, and not
much more.
3) Your current use of Instapaper is no more questionable (really,
less so) than their use of the content that they strip down and
organize for their users. They take content and strip the ads and
links from it without compensating content sites or requiring their
users to compensate the content owners/producers. So how is it not
reasonable for you to use it in the way you have been?

Just my two cents. If you managed a quick fix for how they changed
their article listings (the move from a single page of links to
multiple pages that screwed up Wordcycler's ability to pull all of the
articles), could I beta test it?

If you truly feel that scraping Instapaper is truly unacceptable,
could you try making use of the export function that the site has,
that allows you to export a list of all your article links as a csv or
HTML file? I know Read It Later can use that file to recreate an
Instaapaper queue on their site, so couldn't Wordcycler do the same
just to get the needed links and article titles?