pagefeed logo PageFeed is a simple web service to help you organise the pages you’d like to read, but just don’t have the time (or desire) to read through right now.

If you’ve ever used Instapaper, or the newer Read It Later, Pagefeed will feel pretty familiar. The idea is that when you come across an interesting page that you don’t have time to read right now, you just save it to PageFeed via a handy bookmarklet. You can close the page, and PageFeed will remember all the pages you’ve saved for reading later.

Instapaper and Read It Later both have their own iPhone apps for reading stuff offline. Which is great, but it seems a little unnecessary - and it makes for yet another app you have to remember to open and sync every day. And you know what? There’s already a super robust way to subscribe to a stream of HTML items - it’s called RSS. PageFeed puts the HTML contents of your saved pages into your own private RSS feed. You can then use your favourite online / offline feed reader - you can take the content wherever you like and use it on whatever platform you fancy. You can also use the PageFeed home page for managing your list of saved pages away from your RSS reader.

PageFeed isn’t perfect; it can’t put HTML contents in a feed if it can’t parse the HTML page properly. And if there’s one thing the internet is good at, it’s malformed HTML. But it does pretty well, and if it can’t save the page contents then it will still keep the URL around for you to visit later.

PageFeed runs on AppEngine and uses google accounts, so chances are you already have an account.

The newest version (0.8) of GRiS (the RSS reader I wrote for the iPhone) has support for PageFeed - when you click a link in an article’s contents, you can opt for it to be saved to PageFeed instead of opened in MobileSafari. If you’d like to offer similar functionality in your RSS (or other) application, get in touch!