Save, organize and read articles with Instapaper — bookmarks, folders and highlights over its OAuth 1.0a xAuth API.
Instapaper ships in the w6w first-party pack. It declares 18 actions, 1 health check, and the host runs its code in a sandbox that never sees the credential.
io.w6w.instapaperInstapaper is a read-it-later service: save an article’s URL and read a clean, distraction-free text version of it later, across devices. This app covers Instapaper’s Full API (instapaper.com/developers, its older but still-live and unchanged REST surface, verified against two live snapshots seven months apart) — the complete documented method set for bookmarks (list, add, delete, star/unstar, archive/unarchive, move, update reading progress, get the processed text view), folders (list, add, delete, reorder) and highlights (list, create, delete).
Authentication is Instapaper’s xAuth: a server-to-server exchange of the user’s Instapaper username/password for a long-lived OAuth 1.0a access token, signed with an app-level consumer key/secret Instapaper issues after a manual review. Every request after that is signed with OAuth 1.0a (HMAC-SHA1) — there is no bearer token or API key. Instapaper documents no token expiry and no refresh endpoint, so the exchanged token is used as-is; the account password is not retained.
Instapaper publishes no vendor status page (status.instapaper.com does not resolve; instapaper.statuspage.io is an unclaimed decoy) — the health check states that absence explicitly, and the derived credential check (account/verify_credentials) is the working signal for “is this connection live”.
Three routes to the same 18 actions. The Workflow tab is generated from Instapaper's own manifest and carries its real ids, so it is copy-pasteable; the Code and CLI examples are the same call for any action on any app, so every app-specific value in them is a blank you fill in.
bookmarks-delete Permanently delete a bookmark. This is NOT the same as archiving it.
bookmarks-list List the user's bookmarks in a folder (or by tag), and sync reading positions.
bookmarks-unarchive Move a bookmark from the Archive to the top of the Unread folder.
bookmarks-update-read-progress Record the user's reading progress on a bookmark.
folders-set-order Reorder the user's folders. Include every folder for a consistent result.
highlights-create Create a highlight on a bookmark. Non-subscribers are limited to 5 per month.
highlights-list List the highlights saved against a bookmark. HTML in highlight text is returned unescaped.
A workflow step names the app and the action, and the editor fills in the
connection when you pick one. This is the Step shape from the
workflow spec, carrying Instapaper's real ids.
{
"manifestVersion": "2",
"name": "instapaper-example",
"steps": [
{
"id": "bookmarks-add",
"uses": {
"app": "io.w6w.instapaper",
"action": "bookmarks-add",
"connection": "conn_YOUR_CONNECTION_ID"
},
"with": {
"url": "<url>"
}
}
]
}bookmarks-add account-verify-credentials bookmarks-get-text bookmarks-list bookmarks-move +13 more actions available
Every app-specific value here is a blank you have to fill in. An
app action is reached through the connection that authenticates it, so the
address is a connection id, not the app id — and connections belong to your account,
so a public page cannot know yours. Create one for Instapaper, then fill in
the three blanks: conn_YOUR_CONNECTION_ID, the action key, and the
parameters that action declares. The call itself is real — the shape is transcribed
from the studio's own snippet builder, which prints the same kind of blanks — but
nothing in it is specific to Instapaper. The Workflow tab is where this app's
real ids are.
npm install @w6w/sdkyarn add @w6w/sdkpnpm add @w6w/sdkdeno add npm:@w6w/sdkimport { W6wClient, isActionRun } from "@w6w/sdk";
// Reads W6W_BASE_URL and W6W_TOKEN from the environment when omitted.
const client = new W6wClient();
const envelope = await client.run({
urn: "conn_YOUR_CONNECTION_ID",
action: "bookmarks-add",
payload: {
url: "<value>",
// title: "<value>",
// description: "<value>",
// folderId: "<value>",
// resolveFinalUrl: "<value>",
// archived: "<value>",
// tags: "<value>",
// content: "<value>",
// isPrivateFromSource: "<value>",
},
});
if (isActionRun(envelope)) console.log(envelope.value); npm install -g @w6w/cli w6w run conn_YOUR_CONNECTION_ID --action bookmarks-add --payload '{"url":"<value>"}' Give an AI agent Instapaper — without giving it Instapaper's credentials. One MCP endpoint exposes every app, function and workflow the caller is entitled to, as tools it can discover and run. Access is granted per team while we onboard.
One tool call{
"name": "w6w_invoke",
"arguments": {
"ref": "app:io.w6w.instapaper#bookmarks-add",
"input": {
"url": "<url>"
}
}
}
Every tool names its target with a single ref. The
app: form above doesn't name a connection at all — the
host resolves which of the caller's Instapaper connections to sign
with, and refuses rather than guesses when the answer is ambiguous.
The token is attached host-side, at the moment of the call. It is never a tool argument, never in the model's context, and never in a transcript — so a prompt injection has nothing to exfiltrate.
Tools are derived per end user from what that person has actually connected and is entitled to — not one shared bot identity carrying the union of everyone's access.
Multi-step work runs on the workflow engine and returns a run handle the agent can poll — retries, branching and state survive the conversation that started them.
Instapaper's declared health checks are on the surface too, so an agent can tell "the vendor is down" from "your credential expired" before it burns a retry on either.
The MCP surface is part of the hosted platform. Instapaper itself is MIT, and the runtime that executes it is source-available (FSL).
Instapaper declares its own checks, so its health is a property of the app rather than something the host guesses at.