Wallabag: a self-hostable application for saving web pages | Hacker News Reader

Wallabag: a self-hostable application for saving web pages

wallabag.org

166 pointsProfDreamer53 comments

Wallabag is a solid alternative to Pocket. The founder's interview on IndieHackers [1] is pretty nice. They seem to be making around $350/mo from their hosted service.

I also wanted to throw in a link to a similar service that I run called EmailThis (https://www.emailthis.me). Instead of having to create an account on another website and installing additional apps, EmailThis works by sending the web page (after stripping ads and clutter) to your email.

[1] https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/wallabag-it

I've been meaning to give Wallabag a shot, and might actually have the wherewithall to do that now.

I'd used Readability, until it shut down (and still have nearly 800 articles now identified only by its rdd.it URL shortener, which is to say, utterly useless to me).

I've been using Pocket for the past two years or so. Unfortunately, the more I use it, the worse it gets.

The basic webpage simplifier aspect of it is fine. The problem is that an archive with more than 100 or so entries in it is effectively write-only. The abililty to search and utilise the store is all but nil.

I've over 6,000 articles saved, with the goal of supporting a research-oriented trove of previously-viewed, vetted, and categorised articles.

It takes several minutes to scroll through my set of tags. There is no text-based incremental search. Nor any other form of text-based search. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.

The one saving grace so far is the ability to export a list of URLs and tags, though working with that takes considerably more effort.

https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/5x2sfx/pocket_...

https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/688oc9/pocket_...

Pocket Premium does offer full-text search - https://help.getpocket.com/article/882-pocket-premium-faq#q2

However it was completely useless for me the handful of times I tried to use it.

I mention that in the articles -- I'd had the freebie version of that for a while.

One very unhappy moment was when that went away without notice -- service downgrades are sort of the exact opposite of "underpromise, overdeliver".

And ... the search was at best only marginally useful, as you note.

The other antipattern aspects of Pocket, as well as the absolute failure to progress in anything remotely like a useful direction, are exceedingly disappointing.

Can you also give EmailThis a shot?

As I've written in the FAQs [1], one of the key advantages of EmailThis is that you don't rely on any external service. So if a service like Readability goes down, you don't end up losing all your saved bookmarks.

Regarding search & filtering, if you are using Gmail or Outlook, you can set filters that automatically move incoming bookmark emails (that EmailThis sends) into specific folders based on keywords/tags.

You can also leverage the fulltext search that your email client provides.

[1] https://www.emailthis.me/pages/faqs#instapaper-readability-a...

I really like the concept, and have strongly considered such a service.

The problem is actually email. I no longer trust it as a secure and private facility.

I've thought of maintaining a local-only email archive as an alternative, which kind of works.

Alternatively, if you were willing to support PGP, and not include metadata in the subject line, that would be an option.

Other than that, I think the idea and service are excellent, and thank you for it, it's just not for me :(

https://pinboard.com has an archive feature and full text search though it doesn't have the features of Readability. It doesn't strip the webpages, but I use Safari's Reader Mode or Firefox's to read them.

https://pinboard.in/ is the correct domain.

Wow not sure why there's so much hate in the initial comments here. I've been using Wallabag for months now as an open source replacement for Pocket and it's been great. They've got great mobile clients, too, which is really what I was looking for. It's not _perfect_ -- some articles get scraped incorrectly or incompletely, but that's fairly rare. Overall this is a great open source project that I haven't really seen getting much press for some reason.

I was hesitant to switch over before due to Pocket support on my Kobo reader but apparently now there is a wallabag app for Kobos as well! Gonna give it a try.

I don't understand why there's so much hate for asking basic questions about what the point of using Wallabag is. I am asking questions because I don't understand why this would be appealing. I am not suggesting people should hate it.

Try phrasing your question differently:

"This seems very similar to what I can do for free in Chrome using extension/hack/little know default functionality xyz - am I missing something?"

Now I'm not saying we should put soft blankets around everything we say but in this case it would be more useful for us to read (if you have a good solution) and indicates that you are aware that the rest of us might have found something useful that you overlooked.

I have a po'-mans version of this: I print everything to PDF.

From PDF, I can grep/grok/sed/convert to my hearts content.

So okay yeah, my po'-mans document/information-organization-system consists of a bit of muscle memory and judicious use of ^-R to get to the ol' grep. But .. true fact .. if you do the info-management at the command line, it scales.

GUI's don't, whether they're web or otherwise.

The discussion 3 months ago on bookmarks mentioned several options for archiving pages (some locally): Ask HN: Do you still use browser bookmarks? | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14064096

extensions: Firefox "Print Edit" Addon / Firefox Scrapbook X / Chrome Falcon / Firefox Recoll

open source: Zotero / WorldBrain / Wallabag

commercial: Pinboard / InstaPaper / Pocket / Evernote / Mochimarks / Diigo / PageDash / URL Manager Pro / Save to Google / OneNote / Stash / Fetching

public: http://web.archive.org / https://archive.is/

Request / recommendation to the Wallabag team: please provide a video or slideshow (I'd actually prefer the latter, mostly) which shows an advanced-use workflow.

The wallabag.org video shows ... pretty much nothing of any value.

I checked YouTube and found several "how to install" vids, but nothing showing actual use.

As I've described in an earlier comment (and extensive posts at https://dredmorbius.reddit.org), for someone who's looking for a true archiving tool with research interests, and for whom porting an archive of several thousand (or more) references is not a trivial undertaking, lowering the ramp to understanding the value of this tool is crucial.

Thanks.

After looking at the website, it still took me some time reading the comments to understand what it does. It's an open source version of pocket you can host yourself, and if you want, they host for you for 12 euros a year.

It's interesting, but pointing to the product page instead of the github project page makes it look like advertising a paid pocket competitor with no apparent advantages.

Perfect fit for sandstorm.io - although making it that easy to self-host might undermine their business model.

Although - it's getting pretty easy to deploy things in a bunch of different ways nowadays. If your business model is entirely based on "I don't want to host this myself" then there's a chance it might be increasingly fragile.

Already on cloudron - https://cloudron.io/store/org.wallabag.cloudronapp.html

It's here: https://cloudron.io/store/org.wallabag.cloudronapp.html

Cloudron in General is pretty goof. They just released the 1.0 version.

It's already part of Yunohost, which is where I first heard of it. I don't think making it easy to self-host is a problem to them.

This looks very interesting and like something I'd love to use, but I'm not sure it's functionally complete. For example, saving this thread to it gives me this: http://imgur.com/a/VFQ45. None of the comments appear...

I had Wallabag on my VPS (more than a year ago) but there were issues with the session cookies where I basically had to login every time I wanted to access it. This was so tedious I stopped using it. I hope this has been resolved now, I really liked Wallabag.

Deleted comment

Wallabag seems to be self-hosted [1]. What functionality is missing for you?

[1]: https://doc.wallabag.org/en/admin/installation/installation....

What is up with the background music for app demo videos these days? These cute, jaunty, almost childlike melodies all seem the same to me and I'm trying to think of where I first heard the trend. Was it Apple in the late 00s?

Any comments on https://www.dropmark.com/?

Noone has mentioned webrecorder.io, which is what i use to archive pages.

Need to register just to actually see and try out the application? Just no.

Just use a throwaway email and register, it will only takes 15 seconds of your time. That's the the purpose of Wallabag to get his own list of links

Also, why is this on a .org domain?

It's an open source project - the source is available here https://github.com/wallabag/wallabag

Ok, I stand corrected. But to be honest, the webpage looks so much like it's a business that I can't blame myself for being fooled here ...

It's the Wordpress model. Host wallabag.org yourself, or pay for the hosted service wallabag.it.

Why should I pay 12 Euro a year to do something I can do in Chrome for free?

- You don't have to pay, you can self host.

- You may want to access your bookmarks outside of chrome.

- You may want to access your bookmarks when you are not in a safe machine.

- You may want an API for your bookmarks.

- You may not be using chrome.

- You may care about your privacy and want to split the data stack about you among as many providers as possible.

> Self host

That's more expensive than the 12 Euro when you factor in the time I would have to spend to do that.

> Outside of Chrome

Ok, substitute Chrome for any browser. How is this better than reading the saved webpage off of a hard disk?

> Not in a safe machine

If the machine is not safe, why am I using it at all?

> API

To do what, exactly?

> may not be using Chrome

Every browser now has a "Save webpage, complete" feature. It's not a Chrome thing.

> privacy

There's nothing more private than my hard disk.

You might have missed the point. This allows you to share saved webpages accross machines. The save webpage, complete feature saves it to your hard drive, locally. What I want is to be able to save pages from my desktop, and read them from my android phone.

I definitely missed the point; that's why I asked what the point is.

Thank you for clarifying that the thing you want that this software provides is the ability to synchronize saved content across multiple devices of different platforms.

> There's nothing more private than my hard disk. > Uploads bookmarks to cloud

I don't upload my bookmarks to cloud.

Ok, so you disabled that in Chrome?

But you have to admit those are all valid use-cases for Wallabag.

One reason: portability. If you use multiple devices but aren’t using Chrome on all of them then you can still access your data through the web front-end.

I'm not sure you have RSS reader in chrome or an API to access your bookmarks for example ...

Ok, let me rephrase the question: if the service provided is to save a complete webpage, why would I want to muck around with an RSS reader and an API and all of that extra effort as opposed to just saving in my browser, whichever it happens to be?

I don't just mean Chrome, either. Mobile Safari seems to have a pretty good offline pages functionality included with it.

If you are happy with Chrome, then there is no reason to change. Nevertheless being able to access his bookmarks from any computers is already a good thing to have for some people

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