a blog post about Wallabag
Tons of information are passing through your eyes every day. People now are browsing than reading and there are some things you really want to store and read them when you have some free time. Bookmarks are pretty useful for storing the url but the actual content could be moved somewhere else or even removed from the original place.
read-it-later applications have worked their magic and offline (or caching) storing the actual content to another location. Some of these applications (or online services) have the ability to synchronize their content to your tablet/smartphone or even your ebook reader. The most known service is, of course, pocket.
But then again you have to register to another online service that uses your email for userid and now knows every single thing you like to read! And what will happen if the company behind this service decides to close this or change their policy to sell yours info or hacked or …. whatever …. ?
Well that’s the nice thing about free software!
You can self-hosting your own application for saving web pages (aka read-it-later) with wallabag
Just download and extract the latest version inside your web server document root path:
cd /var/www/
wget -c http://wllbg.org/latest -O wallabag_latest.zip
unzip wallabag_latest.zip
mv wallabag_VERSION wallabag
At this moment you have your own self-hosted read-it-later service.
You need to generate a token for apps to connect with your wallabag instance (login –> config –> Feeds –> generate token) and it will produce something like that:
Token: sd/sdfSDFsdffd20
User ID: 1
Add the firefox add-on from here and then you have to configure only your wallabag URL.
For your smartphone you can use this app
wallabag from F-droid
For this app you need to write the token so that you can synchronize your feeds to your phone.
Wallabag has many features - the most useful for me is the epub export. I can store my articles to my ebook reader !
How about security ? I dont care to setup wallabag under an SSL certificate or bother with “basic auth” login cause i store public articles !!! If someone obtains my credentials he/she/it can use wallabag to mesh with my articles (ok - i have backups) but he/she/it will not gain access to “private” information. That’s said - that dont mean that i dont value of the above (on the contrary) - is just a way to say that in my wallabag instance, i only store already public/publish web pages!
[Edit] UX - update - support - donate
I forgot to mention on my original post that i do appreciate 3 major things when using an free software project.
First is the UX, if something is toooooo difficult for me to use it, i’ll pass it. Even if it is the best project ever. Wallabag isnt top notch on UX, but the design isnt destructive at all when reading an offline article. The work that nicosomb have made on that is really nice.
Second thing the update process: If is too hard for me to update a project, soon i will be bored to do it. I am an intermediate linux user and an open source advocate but i am lazy. Too lazy. Wallabag is super easy to update. Just download and extract. I am amazed that this process isnt already inside wallabag config section. I hope to see that in the next release. But it’s really nice to be notified (internal checks when using config page) and do the hard work of opening a shell, login, download and extract the new release :P
Third thing in my forgot list is support. Wallabag is active and has a new support process. Something that not many opensource projects have. And Nicola (core developer) isnt a hard man to find on social media. That’s always something useful and handy for small things but a known fact that the developer is not MIA.
Finally i choose to support projects via donations. My donates are always smalls - cause i dont have (yet) millions to spare. But even a small contribution from many people can manage to pay for the VPS or other costs that the developer have to pay from his pocket.