2023-12-23 readeck a libre, self hosted, read later web application

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Joachim

Depuis quelques mois j’ai eu le privilège et le plaisir de tester Readeck, le projet de @aspyrine

C’est un service pour sauver—et garder—des articles, pages web, et médias.

Ce que j’aime c’est que ça agit contre le link rot, la disparition graduelle des sites et des contenus du web.

J’ai aussi pu aider à améliorer le code, ça fait plaisir d’aider les amis !

Allez voir par vous-mêmes : https://readeck.org/

Déjà installable chez soi, bientôt testable en ligne !

Introducing Readeck

Dec 23, 2023

Hi, my name is Olivier and I’m the creator of Readeck, an open source web application that lets you save content from the web so you can access it later and keep it forever.

A few years ago, I started scratching an itch that had been bugging me for too long; what if I built an app that’d let me save content from the Web so I could read it on my e-reader later on?

After some years of work on the project, I’m proud and happy to share it with all of you.

Instead of writing again about all the features , I’d like to focus on why yet another read-later app.

Once upon a time in lock-down

First came the pandemic. In early 2020, my country, as many others, entered a lock-down that forced us to stay at home and soon enough most of us asked the same question: what distraction can I come up with?

There are loads of read-later tools out there, I know. I started Readeck because none of them worked the way I wanted them to. Some are complex pieces of engineering with tons of settings and a convoluted install process. Others are closed source or promised years ago to become open source.

This is how Readeck started, with a simple wish list:

  • It must be easy to use

  • There must be as few options as possible

  • It must be dead simple to install

  • It must be fast

Your Choice

The web is a vast place with a gazillion of resources covering any topic one can think of. I dislike being told by some algorithm what I should read today. I want to choose myself and save what I consider interesting.

Readeck won’t choose for you (it’s your job) but it will let you save anything you consider worth keeping. Revisit what you save: on the same day, over the weekend or a year from now. Read it on your computer, phone or e-reader. Your choice.

Forever Archival

Content on the web disappears every day .

Chances are that an article or picture you stumbled upon a few months ago is just gone by now.

When you save something in Readeck (let’s call it a bookmark) it extracts the meaningful content (an article, a picture…) and keeps everything that comes with it.

Look, even if your Readeck server stops working, or you stop running it, the content is still there for you. A bookmark is a simple archive file that contains everything that was saved.

Simplicity

Who wants a cluttered interface, with settings all over the place, without consistence nor direction? I know I don’t.

Readeck tries its best to provide an elegant, accessible and straightforward interface without bombarding you with settings and options.

When it comes to curating bookmarks, Readeck provides labels and saved search queries that are called collections.

I believe this is enough to organize content and, at the same time, to have an easy access to something like « the unread bookmarks, with the tag society, that I saved in the past two weeks ».

The Road Ahead

Today, Readeck is half way on materializing its initial vision: bridge the gap between the reading experience and website subscriptions (or feeds).

You should be able to subscribe to websites, organize them and save any entry you’d like to keep forever.

It’s an ambitious goal but I’m confident that Readeck will progress towards this goal in 2024.