Rolling my own Read It Later solution

[blog.git] / content / posts / read-it-later-solution.md

---
title: "Rolling my own Read It Later solution"
date: 2020-09-18T23:51:09+05:30
lastmod: 2020-09-18T20:40:09+05:30
tags : [ "free-software", "Pocket", "Wallabag", "read-it-later", "Syncthing", "SingleFile", "Firefox", "addons" ]
categories : [ "free-software", "privacy", "archiving" ]
layout: post
type:  "post"
highlight: false
---

After using Pocket (originally called Read It Later) and the self-hostable free software
Wallabag, I [started wondering](https://toot.thoughtworks.com/@njoseph_1/104872980794830072) 
if this problem of archiving web pages to read later can be solved without
having to use a web application.

Pocket             | Wallabag
:-------------------------:|:-------------------------:
![Pocket Logo](/blog/pocket.png) | ![Wallabag Logo](/blog/wallabag.png)

Essentially, what I need is a way of saving the entire content of a web page for
offline reading and maintain a list of such items. Also, I'd like the files to be
available on multiple devices. 

![Why not Syncthing meme](/blog/why-not-syncthing.png)

My go-to solution for making things available on multiple devices is [Syncthing](https://syncthing.net/ "Syncthing website").
Syncthing is a file synchronization solution that allows synchronizing the files
in one directory across multiple devices (a lot like rsync). Now the problem
boils down to saving web pages as files.

Most browsers allow you to save webpages. But webpages saved thus are not a
single file, but a HTML file and a folder containing images, CSS files and
other assets. There's fortunately a Firefox addon called
[SingleFile](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/single-file
"SingleFile addon") which does exactly this. It allows you to save a webpage as
a single HTML file by embedding the CSS, fonts, images etc. 
(Printing to PDF is another option, but I'm not a big fan of PDF files.)

SingleFile             | Syncthing
:-------------------------:|:-------------------------:
![SingleFile logo](/blog/singlefile.png) | ![Syncthing logo](/blog/syncthing.png)

Firefox allows you to configure custom shortcuts for each extension. My
preferred shortcut for saving a page for offline reading is Alt+C. You can also
click on the SingleFile icon to save the current page.

![SingleFile addon shortcut](/blog/singlefile-addon-shortcut.png)

SingleFile doesn't provide an option to set the download directory but saves the
file to the default download directory of the browser. I don't use the default
download directory anyway, so I set it to `~/Sync/to-read`
(`~/Sync` is the default directory synced by Syncthing). For other downloads,
Firefox asks me where to save each download.

![Firefox default download location](/blog/firefox-default-download.png)

In the file manager, simply sort by "Last Modified" to see the latest saved items. 

![Sorting by last modified](/blog/last-modified.png)

You can now read your pages completely offline - a feature which most
read-it-later services cannot boast of!

## Caveats

* Browser performance might suffer when loading large pages saved by SingleFile.
  Printing to PDF might be a better option in this case.
* Firefox Reader View might not work on a saved page even if it had worked on the original page.

## Acknowledgements

Thanks to [@mathew@mastodon.social](https://mastodon.social/@mathew "Mathew's profile on mastodon.social") for suggesting the SingleFile addon.