Glanceable

2 October 2026

I always have a long backlog of articles on my read-it-later list, yet I often scroll through my podcast subscriptions wishing there was something more interesting to listen to while I do the washing up.

The obvious solution is to pipe long articles through a text-to-speech model and listen to them. I used to use a service called Listen Later which did exactly this. You send it article URLs and after a short wait, an audio version of the article would show up in a private podcast feed, just for you. It worked well.

Later I switched to Readwise Reader – a read-it-later service with a built-in text-to-speech system that allows you to listen to any article saved to the app. Again – this was pretty good, especially as the app had highlighting and annotation features.

Ultimately, having a separate app to manage my read-it-later list became a silo that I didn’t check frequently enough. Now I keep my to-read list in my todo list app (which is and forever will be Things).

Then there is the problem of lectures and seminars which are usually shared as videos. Finding the time to sit and watch a long lecture on YouTube, is difficult and it is often far more convenient to simply listen to it. However, converting the video into audio means stripping away all the important visual parts of the talk, such as the slides and anything the speaker writes or points to.

Glanceable podcasts

Alex Chan created a lovely solution to the video problem with a glanceable podcast. Her idea was to take frames from the video every few seconds and insert them as chapter images in the MP3. Podcast apps like Overcast will display these images on the iPhone lock screen, so if you are listening to a lecture need to see what the speaker is talking about, you can glance at your lock screen while listening along. You don’t need to stay glued to a video and your phone can even be in your pocket most of the time.

Glanceable podcasts also work great when applied to written articles with images. The Stratechery podcast is a narrated version of Ben Thompson’s column on tech and business and it is very glanceable. The Stratechery team take care to embed any images from each article as MP3 chapter images, at the same point that they appear in the text. So when Ben says “see the chart of Meta’s earnings”, you can actually see the chart. I wish more podcasts and especially audiobooks would do this.

Making a personal, glanceable podcast feed

So, Alex’s project inspired me to build my own glanceable podcast feed for listening to articles and videos. I finally managed to listen to an hour-long blackboard lecture on general relativity, with images of the board updating on my iPhone lock screen:

Here is a glanceable version of an essay about vernacular design in the age of AI, where the images are an important part of the story:

Tooling

I manage this personal podcast feed with a tool I made that processes videos and articles into glanceable episodes and posts them to the feed. The tool is a set of Python scripts and some natural language instructions, packaged as a Claude Skill. It works well so far.

The benefit of it being an Claude Skill, rather than a set of rigid scripts, is that Claude can work around issues when they inevitably come up, such as inaccessible articles, YouTube rate limiting and mispronunciations in the text-to-speech output.

If you find this idea useful, you can use the tool to make your own feed and finally get around to listening to your read-it-later and watch-it-later lists.

Huge thanks to Alex Chan for sharing the original idea and implementation.