epershand

ETA: SUCCESS. Thanks, folks, he's fixed it.

If you are a user of Instapaper for reading fanfic, you are probably familiar with the annoying habit of the iPhone client and a few Android clients to smoosh all paragraphs on LiveJournal and Dreamwidth together into one paragraph of doom.

As it turns out, it's possible to fix this problem for individual subdomains with the Text-parser configuration page, and a few weeks ago I submitted the appropriate changes for DW news and LJ news. (I also told it to strip out icons and username heads, because often those do not load anyway)

However, only an administrator at Instapaper can modify a set of rules to apply to an entire domain, and obviously adding a custom rule for every single LJ and DW account out there is not scalable. It looks like the only way to get this changed is to email the developer, Marco Arment, directly. He's a busy guy and a request from a single user is probably pretty low on his radar. But there are a *lot* of us who are using Instapaper for fic (honestly, I don't know any dedicated users who aren't fic readers, although I know that I have a strong sample bias) and together I'm pretty sure we can get his attention.

Will you please join me in writing to instapaper@marco.org to get the LJ and DW configuration optimized?

Here's a sample letter, based on the one I sent him. Feel free to modify as you see fit.

Subject line: Instapaper Optimization for livejournal.com and dreamwidth.org

Hi Marco,

I've recently become incredibly addicted to using Instapaper--it's an awesome product.

I use it a lot with pages from livejournal.com and dreamwidth.org, both of which sites have some parsing problems with their paragraph separations. There are optimizations for a subdomain of each site listed on the Text-parser configuration page, but since both sites use a distinct subdomain per user, the optimizations need to be expanded to *.livejournal.com and *.dreamwidth.org to apply.

I know you're busy, but can you or another Instapaper admin please update http://www.instapaper.com/bodytext/edit/157 and http://www.instapaper.com/bodytext/edit/156 to apply to their respective full domains?

Thanks!