Wallabag
â â â â â
Wallabag is a service for saving articles you find on the web to read later. Itâs built on open-source software that you can run yourself if you want (but you donât have to). Not as polished as Pocket, but you know itâs not using your saved bookmarks to train a recommendation engine!
Setup is a bit clunky, even using the hosted service at wallabag.it, and itâs not quite as good as Pocket at extracting the content of an article. This varies according to site, of course. Sites like this one that just show you the article will work better than sites that break into the middle with a 12-image carousel and a âsign up to read moreâŠâ dialog or a redirect through CloudFlare.
You can also export articles to various formats ranging from plain text to PDF or ePub. So if you have a super-long article you want to read on an e-reader later on â or a group of articles? Easy!
Feeds and Automation
Both incoming and outgoing feeds are supported. You can set it up to follow RSS/Atom feeds to add posts to your reading list. And in the website config, you can enable full-text feeds for unread, archived, starred, or all articles so you can read them in any feed reader. Outgoing feeds include any tags youâve added, but not annotations.
This also means you can use feeds for automation: You can use another service to aggregate keyword searches, and as long as the results are readable as a feed, you can pipe that into Wallabag. Or you can use Wallabag as a source, using IFTTT to send your starred items to another bookmarks service, or build a linkblog out of articles youâve given a particular tag, or create a draft post. You wonât want to just give out your starred feed URL, because all of your outgoing feeds have the same access token.
Another cool feature for automation is tag rules: Like custom email filters, you can create rules to automatically tag articles based on the title, estimated reading length, content, and various other elements. This is especially useful when following feeds.
Browser Integration
Chromium/Firefox Browser Add-Ons
Chromium-based and Firefox-based browsers that support WebExtensions can use the Wallabagger extension to save an article from the toolbar. (Here it is at the Chrome Web Store and Firefox Add-Ons.) It also lets you add tags if you want, and it can (usually) extract the content from the view youâre looking at, which helps with paywalls and login walls. (Otherwise the Wallabag service doesnât necessarily have access to your logged-in view.)
This extension also works in [Orion] as a toolbar button, but currently canât add itself to the drop-down menu on links.
Setting it up needs API keys, and the UI doesnât make it clear when itâs actually ready to use. Once youâve got it working, though, you can save it to a file and load that config in the extension on another device or browser. Mostly.
Safari Extension
Safari can use the Wallabag QuickSave extension (App Store), which is similar but just silently adds the page. You can always add tags later on.
Though I did have trouble setting it up on my old home MacBook: the setup window was twice as high as the screen, with all the fields way down at the bottom. I had to use the overview to see what field was selected, return to the window, type or paste, hit tab, repeat until I could validate my credentials.
Bookmarklet
Other browsers like Falkon can use the bookmarklet, which you can find on the web app in the âHowtoâ section under your account menu. (Here it is on Wallabag.it.) Though I find myself missing that drop-down option for adding a link directly instead of browsing to it first.
Mobile
The Wallabag Android app handles offline sync well once you enable the right settings. I have it set to run a âfastâ auto-sync every 12 hours and on start, with the separate auto-sync for local changes, and the âdeleted article sweepâ after fast sync.
Not only can I read articles while offline, I can share a link from my email app to Wallabag while offline, and as with Pocket, itâll add the article once the device is connected again. Iâm still trying to determine under what circumstances it actually caches images, since Iâm still seeing placeholders after enabling âPut article images in cache.â It also has a theme specifically designed for e-ink displays, which is a big help on the Boox Poke3 I use as an eReader.
Edit: One problem I didnât notice until after posting this is that the mobile app doesnât seem to have a way to manually tell it to try re-fetching the content of an article.
Text to speech is at least OK for listening in the car. I havenât used it enough recently to know whether it has the same kinds of oddities in Pocketâs speech back in the day!
I assume the iOS app is similar at least, but Iâve never had the opportunity to use it.
I recently read a review of Frigoligo, another Android app, that has me thinking I should give it a try also. (TODO)
Other Apps
The website view works well installed to a desktop as a progressive web app (PWA) using browsers that support it. Links open in the app, which isnât necessarily what I want all the time.
Linux Desktop / GNOME: Read it Later (on Flatpak) is fairly basic: It lists your unread, starred or archived articles and you can read them in the app. You can also add an article, or move articles between these lists. Links in articles open in your default web browser. Other than that, thereâs no support for tagging, search, or any other features that would help you find a specific article if youâre using Wallabag for more than just âread this thing I saw yesterday.â On the plus side, it does seem to keep articles cached when you go offline, which would make it useful for Linux laptops, tablets, or your desktop if you live somewhere with unreliable internet access.
Some others that I want to try out, but havenât yet:
KOReader: unofficial plugin (TODO)
Kobo eReaders: wallabako (TODO)
And lots more for various other platforms.
Import
In theory itâs able to import from bookmarks, Instapaper, and Pocket. Itâs supposed to be able to import directly from Pocket, but you need to create a Pocket app, generate keys, and even then I havenât gotten it to work. Sometimes it tells me it failed, sometimes it times out, sometimes it throws a generic 500 server error, and sometimes it throws this specific error:
500: Internal Server Error
Wallabag\ImportBundle\Import\AbstractImport::parseEntriesForProducer(): Argument #1 ($entries) must be of type array, null given, called in /var/www/wallabag.it/app2019/src/Wallabag/ImportBundle/Import/PocketImport.php on line 134
Maybe I havenât figured out the permissions, or maybe I just have some really old data in there. Iâve been using Pocket since it was called Read It Later, and before Mozilla bought it.
For now Iâm just reading from both and adding to Wallabag, figuring Pocket will eventually clear out. At some point I might try to move the backlog again, either directly or by exporting a file and then trying to convert it to the right CSV format for Wallabag to read.