I am a fairly satisfied Pocket customer, but it’s always fun to mess around with potential alternatives. Wallabag is one such alternative. It is, er, very much like Pocket, but you host it yourself. It might be I have found a self-hosting frontier, though. I have Linkding, which is very pinboard-like and more to my taste for bookmark management generally, but I need to experiment with a few of its integrations to see if maybe it can do everything I want.

Installation on my Synology was pretty easy. I followed a Docker recipe, plumbed it into my reverse proxy, and it’s … fine? Very Pocket-like. There’s an iOS app. There are Firefox apps. It provides custom Atom feeds for your new, unread, archived, and starred items. It also provides public URLs to items you’ve saved to share with others, which is considerate. You can write rules to label your content based on domain, URL, title, reading time, and more.

I like the custom Atom feeds, because you can just subscribe to them in an RSS reader and you have access to a cleanly formatted full-text version in your reader, so you don’t have to use Wallabag to read your stuff.

Wallabag and Calibre

You can also subscribe to those feeds in Calibre, which will make a daily digest epub suitable for reading on an e-reader. With my Calibre-Web/Kobo integration, I can recreate the Kobo/Pocket integration by making Wallabag “books” that appear in Calibre-Web and sync to my Kobo.

Is it important to not use Pocket anymore? I don’t think so? I don’t mind replacing pinboard.in because I’m not super sure about its future. Pocket seems fine and I don’t ever treat RIL services as an important long-term storage thing. I tend to get to my list pretty quickly or use a skill I developed of just deleting stuff when I realize I don’t really want to read it anymore.

The Kobo integration is what makes it seem most compelling, but it could be I can manage that with Linkding’s RSS feeds, as well. I need to make a news download for Calibre and test.

In the meantime, Wallabag also has an API, so I will see about repurposing my Linkding Newsboat plugin to use my Wallabag instance with Newsboat.

Newsboat is pretty cool! It’s a plaintext RSS reader that has strong affinities for mutt in look and configuration.

Like mutt, it might not crowd out everything else in the toolbox but it can help you burn through the subscription list and triage even if you have more comfortable ways of reading the content you process.

It also has built-in filtering. If you’re using an RSS provider that already does that, e.g. FreshRSS or Feedly, that might not be super valuable, but it’s easy to make a killfile either way:

ignore-mode display
ignore-article "*" "link =~ \"/ducks/\""
ignore-article "*" "link =~ \"/advice/\""
ignore-article "*" "link =~ \"/nfl/\""
ignore-article "*" "link =~ \"/beavers/\""
ignore-article "*" "link =~ \"/blazers/\""
ignore-article "*" "link =~ \"/highschoolsports/\""
ignore-article "*" "link =~ \"/entertainment/\""
ignore-article "*" "link =~ \"/realestate-news/\""
ignore-article "*" "link =~ \"/food/\""
ignore-article "*" "link =~ \"/hawks/\""

Scripting the Linkding API to make a bookmark function for Newsboat

If you like reading longform plaintext maybe Newsboat is all you need. I tend to treat RSS as a two-step process: See an interesting thing, send it to some sort of RIL or bookmarking service. Newsboat has a bookmarking function you can customize with your own scripts. It just passes the article URL, title, description, and website description to your script, which has to talk to whatever API. There are a bunch of examples in the Newsboat contrib directory for things like Pocket, Pinboard, and Evernote. No Linkding, but the Linkding API is simple enough.

Could be simpler but I bounced off of net:http in my formative years:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

require 'httparty'
require 'json'

linkding_uri = "https://links.puddingtime.net/api/bookmarks/"

# Get your Linkding API key from Settings > Integrations

token = ENV['LINKDING']

link_url = ARGV[0]
link_title = ARGV[1]
description = ARGV[2]
website_title = ARGV[3]

params = {url: URI(link_url), title: link_title, website_title: website_title, unread: true}
headers = {'Content-Type' => "application/json", 'Authorization' => "Token #{token}"}

resp = HTTParty.post(linkding_uri, body: params.to_json, headers: headers)