RSS-Librarian is a read-it-later service for RSS purists. Instead of creating another service such as Pocket or Instapaper (together with a separate app), RSS-Librarian will let you add articles you want to read to a personal RSS feed and they will show up in your RSS reader, where you can use the local functionality (for instance starring new articles) to mark them for later reading. RSS-Librarian uses no database and works without accounts.
Sample instance hosted here: https://alternator.hstn.me/librarian.php (important note: if your reader cannot deal with self-signed certificates, use http instead!)
The project was born out of a personal frustration of mine: My workflow for reading anything I am interested in is by adding a star in my RSS reader to an article, which necessitates that anything I want to read is somehow a subscription I can add to my RSS reader, and that isn't true for single articles I get sent by someone.
RSS-Librarian solves this issue with a self-hostable PHP file by extracting content from articles using a readability service and directly writing them as new entries into a personal RSS feed, without requiring special libraries, a database or user accounts.
You want to:
- Store single articles in a RSS reader application
- Avoid third-party read-it-later services such as Pocket, Instapaper or Wallabag
- Minimize the amount of necessary apps for reading articles
- Get rid of accounts and not sign up to anything
- Read articles (offline) in a readable format, but not categorize or store them indefinitely
- Synchronize stored articles to multiple devices
- Optionally be able to self-host the whole architecture
Go to your librarian instance (try here) and simply add your first URL.
On the next page you will see two important things:
- Your personal URL: Store this URL in your bookmarks! This allows you to add more articles to your personal RSS feed.
- Your personal RSS feed: This is your feed that you can subscribe to with your RSS reader application. It is unique and can only be managed with the personal URL above.
It is important - after adding your first link - to bookmark your personal URL somewhere so you can keep adding links to your feed (instead of creating a new one accidentally)!
You can drop librarian.php onto any host that supports PHP with no other requirements. RSS-Librarian has two parameters: librarian.php?id=HASH&url=SOMEPAGE.
idis a random ID for a personal feed. If this parameter is not supplied, RSS-Librarian will generate a new one and add a feed file corresponding toidinto the subfolderfeeds/.urlis a URL you submit to RSS-Librarian, whose content will be extracted and added to the feed coressponding toid.
For each url posted to RSS-Librarian, the extracted content will be added to a RSS file derived from id - if it exists in the feeds/ folder. If it does not exist, it will be generated and written. The RSS file will store a maximum of 100 entries before removing the oldest one and adding the new one. If you want articles cached for a long time, either manually increase max_items or configure your favorite reader to cache downloaded entries longer.
RSS-Librarian uses the RSS extraction of FiveFilters by default. If you can spare some extra space, you can easily add the ability to do the extraction of content locally without having to rely on FiveFilters.
To do this, first install composer by following the instructions until you have composer.phar next to librarian.php in the directory of RSS-Librarian and execute:
php composer.phar require fivefilters/readability.php
This will create a directory called vendor inside your checkout, which you simply upload together with librarian.php to your host. If the RSS-Librarian sees that the vendor directory exists it will switch to use the local readability functionality.