Why?

I'm a big fan of Instapaper, but I have a terrible habit of throwing way too many articles in my Instapaper, only to never read them again. As a result, my Instapaper feed is an unmaintainable list of articles that don't really interest me anymore.

Personally, my goal is to reach 'Instapaper zero', but a list of 200+ articles is not very motivating, and I end up reading nothing at all. About a week ago, I decided to throw out all the old articles I hadn't read. If I don't read something within a month, I probably don't care about it. I was left with a list of about 20 articles, and managed to get to Instapaper zero on a Sunday afternoon. I think this is what Instapaper is meant for.

Of course there are some exceptions. I have two separate folders: longreads and longwatches. Those two folders contain content that takes at least an hour to 'process'. I don't mind if that kind of content stays in my Instapaper for over a month (this script only deletes articles that are in you 'Home' folder.)

TL;DR: When you see a list of 200+ articles, you end up reading none.

How to use

1. Run npm i

2. Create a config.js file

   export default {
     instapaper: {
       key: '[KEY]',
       secret: '[SECRET]',
       username: '[USERNAME]',
       password: '[PASSWORD]'
     }
   }
   

3. Run node index.js

Optionally you could wrap the whole thing inside a node-cron to automatically clean your list every day/week/month.