Right now I use Read You on my phone to get RSS feeds and I read articles on my browser but I want to cut the time I stare at my phone throughout the day so I came up with this system:
Once a week I will look at all the feeds I follow on my PC RSS reader, select the ones I want to read during the next week and save them / export them (possibly in PDF or ePUB?) so that I can put them on my old Kindle (that has no internet access) and read them only using the kindle during the week.
This will drastically reduce the time I use my phone to first scroll and select articles and then to actually read them. Looking at a screen all day for work and also looking at a screen (phone) in my free time is not good for me and I want to change that.
If no RSS reader has that option, does anyone know of another program or firefox extension that would let me “export” web pages as pdfs or epubs?
I like Newsflash. It’s a libadwaita app and is pretty seamless to use. The only problem I have with it is that trying to categorize feeds into categories can be really buggy.
Maybe it’s worth creating a feature request asking for that. Is is possible for Kindles to display downloaded html files? If so, that would probably be much easier to implement.
How are you selecting feeds to download? If you use a cloud/self hosted RSS service you can get a feed of articles you star. From there you can use a desktop feed reader to download the starred feed to your kindle:
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Calibre can download news articles as .epub files, and supports transferring them to the kindle via USB. It can extract webpage text from non full-content feeds in a customizable way with Python.
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KOreader’s RSS feature stores feed items as .epub files as well, but it’s not as customizable. It does support full text extraction, but you don’t get any options to customize the output as far as I can tell.
among other things, there is a plugin for Gemini client for KOReader, there is also something interesting to read there. or antenna-to-epub
Wow I’m already using Calibre but didn’t know about that feature! Awesome, will look into it, thanks!
I second Calibre. You can configure it to roll all the articles into a single epub too, so they don’t clutter your ereader. I tested it out recently and it works really well. I haven’t had the discipline to do it yet but I love the idea of connecting to the internet once a week to download content and messages and then going back offline.
I use it with miniflux to sync between my iPhone, Linux phone, and desktop/laptop
Ohh, do you have miniflux self hosted somewhere so it does the feeds collection, and then on newsflash you hook with the miniflux reader?
What I do to sync (I don’t read feeds on the phone) between desktops is to rsync these 3 dirs:
~/.config/news-flash
~/.local/share/news-flash
~/.local/share/news_flash
That so I don’t lose the feed subscriptions neither the history of what I have already looked at, neither what I’ve kept as starred (there are interesting feeds I want to keep). If miniflux had sort of a client, similar to newsFlash, but that set everything in miniflux rather than locally, so that no matter different desktops (even phones) will have the same starred kept feeds, and the whole history and the like on miniflux… There’s a python client, but I don’t know if it gets any closer to newsFlash. I guess having miniflux, one can hook to it through any web browser as well, but I really like newsFlash interface, hehe.
The sad thing is needing to somehow keep miniflux running somewhere, which is not feasible for me, and perhaps for others, but it’s interesting…
Might not be for you if you are not a TUI person, but I like newsboat. I also use it to watch youtube and listen to podcasts (with mpv). For pdf/epub export you can probably script something that does this.
I like to use feeds because it looks right in gnome.
