Keeping Track of What I've Read
11 Oct 2021
It’s relatively easy to keep track of the books I’ve read. This year I’m on track to finish about 40 books and so a simple list is easily enough to keep track of them. Web articles and blog posts are another matter. I usually read several of them every day, and over the last month I’ve averaged exactly 2.4 articles per day. Fortunately, I’ve recently found a useful and enjoyable way of tracking these articles and enhancing the experience of reading them.
An elevated article reading experience
Enter the free and open source project, wallabag. I’m self hosting wallabag on my home server so there are no additional costs for me, though you can pay a hosting service or subscribe to their service for a fee. The idea is that any time you stumble across a link to an article that you would like to read, you save the article to your wallabag account. Wallabag then fetches the contents of the article, formats it nicely, and creates an entry in your account to be read later. The web version also features some handy highlighting and annotation tools.
Here’s my favorite use of wallabag though. I can sync my Kobo eReader with my wallabag account and it will generate a nice little epub file to be downloaded and read offline on my nice eInk screen. I’ve taken to having my lunch break in a park lately and it’s nice to go sit under a tree with my bread and cheese and have something close to a traditional news paper reading experience with no ads, no distractions, and no notifications. It’s also perfect for when you find a long format article that may take over half an hour to read but don’t have the time for it right this moment.
Reading History
Another benefit besides the format is the built in history. Wallabag keeps all your read articles in an archive and allows you to mark articles as “favorites.” I’ve only been using wallabag for a month and a half but yesterday I took a dive through my 77 article reading history. I wanted to refresh my memory on some of the ones that stood out to me and also explore some of the blogs who I’d only read one or two articles from. The result was fun, a few hours of old fashioned web browsing through personal sites, several new interesting ideas generated, and of course, about 20 new articles added to my wallabag queue for reading later. I found it rewarding, like I’d really gotten something from what used to almost find wasted time.
Improvements
There are a couple things I would like to see added to wallabag to improve it. First, I want to move my RSS feeds to wallabag. The ability to add a feed, have posts accessible on my eReader, and manage all my article reading from the same interface would be great. The second is PDF support. I would love to be able to add a link to a PDF file and have wallabag import it, extract the text, and show it to me the same format as other articles. The third dream feature is expanded annotation functionality. Annotation only works from the desktop browser version of the app. The mobile app, and koReader integration don’t support annotations at all. I guess in koReader you can still highlight and annotate using the koReader tools but then those notes aren’t stored in the same place as all the other ones, not to mention that deleting read articles from the eReader also deletes the annotations. Other than those few things, I really enjoy wallabag and highly recommend it.