I use read-it-later services extensively to save any news I want to do blog posts about later, or something I want to look at in more detail when I have time (and three monitors).

I had been self-hosting Wallbag for quite a while, and did a video about it too, but I had some issues re-installing it when I moved to Docker container hosting on my VPS.

Ominvore certainly looks very interesting, with a modern interface and quite a few useful features. I’m starting so long with their free cloud hosted service, and could register with ease, and even initiate an import from Pocket. They do have a docker-compose file for setting up containerised self-hosting, but I’m going to wait a bit just to see if that matures a bit, as it seems it is early days still and no proper guide has been completed yet for it.

Apart from the usual saving links for reading later, with tags, archiving, etc, it also supports a clutter-free reader view for easy reading without adverts. In the reading view you can also change formatting, highlight text, add/view notes (in a Notebook view), and track reading progress across all devices (each note also shows a yellow progress line on its tile view to indicate reading progress).

It also has a feature for subscriptions via e-mail. Omnivore can generate unique e-mail addresses you can use for subscribing to online newsletters, and it is intelligent enough to realise that if a mail contains a welcome message, note from the author, etc that will be forwarded by Omnivore to your main e-mail address (without exposing that to the newsletter service).

It also has integration with Logseq, Obsidian notes, webhooks, and more.

You can save links by adding them in the app, using a browser extension, or by using the share option on mobile devices and just selecting to share to the Omnivore app.

There is no price model yet set up for the service, but I’m pretty sure they’ll have an ongoing useful free tier with their online service, and probably only charge for some more advanced functionality. There is always the self-hosted option too. But for now, this looks very functional and useful to me, and I’ve started using it.

See https://omnivore.app/

  • I like omnivore a bunch. That said, I’m back on Wallabag simply for the great integration with my RSS reader of choice: Miniflux. Once you’ve set up the api “handshake” its just a click of the save button in Miniflux then it schwoops over to Wallabag. So great.

    I have a docker compose for Wallabag that works perfectly every time I can post if it helps. Once I sanitize the juicy IPs and domain name, that is. And when I say it works everything, realize that I’ve done it like 8 times because when I’d pooch my VPS OS, I’d nuke it and start over.

    EDIT: Here’s the docker-compose I use and it works repeatedly. Which, shit, I’m not ashamed because I’m still learning. But took me a long time to hunt down one that was easy to copy/paste into the .yml and docker-compose up and there ya go. NOTE: One thing that stumped me for a long time was the jacked up launch page after install. If it looks like broken HTML its because you put either an IP or a bad/fake domain name in the compose file. So make sure you have a domain name for it. Also, Wallabag is pretty cheap to have them host. I think its like $17/yr. But for now I’m selfhosting it on a cheap VPS.

    version: '3'
    services:
      wallabag:
        image: wallabag/wallabag
        environment:
          - MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=wallaroot
          - SYMFONY__ENV__DATABASE_DRIVER=pdo_mysql
          - SYMFONY__ENV__DATABASE_HOST=db
          - SYMFONY__ENV__DATABASE_PORT=3306
          - SYMFONY__ENV__DATABASE_NAME=wallabag
          - SYMFONY__ENV__DATABASE_USER=wallabag
          - SYMFONY__ENV__DATABASE_PASSWORD=wallapass
          - SYMFONY__ENV__DATABASE_CHARSET=utf8mb4
          - SYMFONY__ENV__DATABASE_TABLE_PREFIX="wallabag_"
          - SYMFONY__ENV__MAILER_HOST=127.0.0.1
          - SYMFONY__ENV__MAILER_USER=~
          - SYMFONY__ENV__MAILER_PASSWORD=~
          - SYMFONY__ENV__FROM_EMAIL=wallabag@example.com
          - SYMFONY__ENV__DOMAIN_NAME=https://your.domain.tld
          - SYMFONY__ENV__SERVER_NAME="Cool Name here"
        ports:
          - "8585:80"
        volumes:
          - /opt/wallabag/images:/var/www/wallabag/web/assets/images
        healthcheck:
          test: ["CMD", "wget" ,"--no-verbose", "--tries=1", "--spider", "http://localhost"]
          interval: 1m
          timeout: 3s
        depends_on:
          - db
          - redis
      db:
        image: mariadb
        environment:
          - MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=wallaroot
        volumes:
          - /opt/wallabag/data:/var/lib/mysql
        healthcheck:
          test: ["CMD", "mysqladmin" ,"ping", "-h", "localhost"]
          interval: 20s
          timeout: 3s
      redis:
        image: redis:alpine
        healthcheck:
          test: ["CMD", "redis-cli", "ping"]
          interval: 20s
          timeout: 3s