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?
Nowadays I’m trying omnivore.app, also Feeder on Android and Pocket for good measure.
Yeah, came here to recommend this. It’s basic, but the UI is great.
I"m not entirely sure on the pdf / epub use case, is that for RSS contents, or RSS referred contents? If it’s referred contents then perhaps use something like Omnivore or a script/plugin.
I suspect you might be mixing something that’s better done as two different apps into one. Omnivore and similar tools you would probably want an integration for a “read later” tool.
If it’s the RSS contents you might need to use a script or plugin in an existing tool, or just write something.
In terms of desktop RSS readers I like, RSSGuard, but currently using Akgregator.
Miniflux IIRC has integrations for sending things to “read later” tools like “Omnivore” but not many.
You might find something like mailbrew useful, but if you do perhaps a “send to email” is all you needed?
You could also publish content directly to imap and use the phone’s mail client which stores things offline too. (You don’t need a full setup for imap.)
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.
I think most ereaders support rendering HTML, why not just save the HTML page? Thatd be a lot easier than converting formats.
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.
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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.
[…] script something that does this.
Theoretically this pandoc one liner already does it, but depending on the website the layouting is going to be trash.
pandoc -i 'https://the-website-your-rss-items.link.to/' -f html -t epub -o out.epub
I like to use feeds because it looks right in gnome.
I enjoy fluent reader but you cannot export articles as a pdf as far as i know
The most feature-rich RSS reader that I’m aware of, is QuiteRSS. I don’t actually know, though, if it has PDF/ePUB export…
This is the RSS reader I use and like it a lot, but no it does not have an export feature like that.
Maybe you could use the “Single page” firefox extension to save? You could also always print to pdf, this is built into firefox including mobile.
Yeah I thought about the print to pdf feature, hopefully though there are better alternatives. Thanks for the suggestion I will check the extension!
