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?

  • LeafletEnglish
    10•1 month ago

    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.

  • @[email protected]English
    8•1 month ago

    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:

    1. 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.

    2. 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.

    • @[email protected]OP
      2•1 month ago

      Wow I’m already using Calibre but didn’t know about that feature! Awesome, will look into it, thanks!

      • @[email protected]
        2•1 month ago

        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.

    • Ashley
      1•1 month ago

      I use it with miniflux to sync between my iPhone, Linux phone, and desktop/laptop

      • @[email protected]
        2•1 month ago

        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…

        • Ashley
          1•1 month ago

          Yep, Miniflux syncs starred/read/unread articles as well, I sync it with NetNewsWire on my iPhone and it supports all the same features.

          I might actually do what you’ve done with rsync but for Pipeline. AFAIK it doesn’t have any native sync support.

  • Ephera
    4•1 month ago

    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…

    • @[email protected]
      3•1 month ago

      This is the RSS reader I use and like it a lot, but no it does not have an export feature like that.

  • AmbiguousPropsEnglish
    4•1 month ago

    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.

    • @[email protected]OP
      1•1 month ago

      Yeah I thought about the print to pdf feature, hopefully though there are better alternatives. Thanks for the suggestion I will check the extension!

  • @[email protected]
    4•1 month ago

    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.

    • @[email protected]
      5•1 month ago

      […] 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
  • DebianGuy
    3•1 month ago

    I have used QuiteRSS extensively, but switched to RSSGuard recently.

    No major issue with QuiteRSS, but I like how RSSGuard deals with rendering the article without any need for custom CSS.

  • arran 🇦🇺
    2•1 month ago

    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.)