The solution to this problem is to have a good mechanism for tagging a page as “to be read”, and then be able to easily retrieve them at a later date. We’ve already written about using del.icio.us for this purpose, but I’ve come across the Read it Later extension for Firefox that has very similar functionality.

To save a page for later, you can simply click the Read Later button…

Or you can right-click a link and choose to “Read this Link Later”, which is much more useful when you are browsing around social sites with loads of links.

To retrieve the articles later, you can click the Reading List button, or you can use the drop-down menu.

Note: I found the menu to be really flaky… sometimes things would show up, other times they wouldn’t. The button always works even if the menu doesn’t.

Once you are done reading, you can click the Mark as Read button, or you can use the drop-down to quickly add a bookmark as well.

Personally I’m going to stick with Readeroo because I can use it across computers, but this might be useful if you don’t use del.icio.us. Also, the buttons are just HUGE, and there’s no option to make them reasonably sized.

Update: Looks like Nate updated with a new version with a lot of fixes for some of these issues. Now you can also move the buttons around, much more useful.

Download the Read it Later Firefox extension from ideashower.com