How I built forlater.email, my first big side project | Hacker News Reader

How I built forlater.email, my first big side project

icyphox.sh

131 pointsicy25 comments

Great one. Planning to write one such for my own service that I built - https://closetab.email (delivers a weekly digest of bookmarks to my inbox, every monday morning)

Because the biggest problem with bookmarking is forgetting it forever after ;)

I have a side-project in the works for years now, tackling this exact problem, it's called Laters, https://late.rs/

It's literally 5 years old now, hopefully I'll finish it next year.

+1 on that, I need someone to remind me to read though the articles I've bookmarked in the past.

Nice, wasn't expecting the Stormlight Archive easter egg

It certainly put a smile on my face :) and considering the events of Rhythm of War it’s a very fitting name too!

navani would hate to be referred to as a "mail processing service" lol

> I plan to implement some kind of settings@ address to configure and store user settings (dark theme? fonts?). However, this introduces state in an otherwise mostly stateless system.

I think the subject line can be used for settings while still keeping things stateless, e.g arial dark or like a preset name ad.

Or have your mail client or shortcut attach either pre-defined content or a signature to outbound messages destined for this address.

Ex Sincerely, &&&setting.darkmode=true&&&

Or similar.

That's elegant; the subject field isn't used currently. However, it adds extra work for those who want all their articles in dark mode, or any specific style.

I think I'll add support for this anyway. Thanks.

I hated Pocket too. I already used RSS reader, so, I ended up building https://reading.ashishb.net that creates an RSS feed of articles you add. And yeah, it has a readable mode turned on by default.

How do you handle your text/feature extraction?

A third party library :)

Any reason for hating pocket?

I just want to read. And Not go through social features and other fancy things that distract me from actual reading.

Your app looks great! I'm hacking on something related, so always fun to see new takes in this space. Did you try Instapaper as an alternative to Pocket? No intrusive features, great reading experience. I'm a happy paying customer and user for over a decade now.

How well is go-readability working? I was thinking of doing something similar but with Telegram instead.

Does a good job, as good as mozilla/readability.

I've been sending text html emails for my blogletter for over a year now. The single biggest struggle point is the spam filters in gmail/outlook/others which just render my emails waste for majority of the subscribers.

Do you face the same?

I think I recall from a previous post on HN that they use Mailgun. I can't speak for forlater but at my work we use mailgun because email delivery is a pain, as you've found. Using a third-party service is a lot easier because it's their bread and butter and you can let them worry about it.

Would be nice to have a tool that grabs a readable version of an article/link and lets you dump it into your favorite knowledge management tool (Roam, Obsidian, mem, …). Any recommendations for such a tool?

Trilium[0] has a web clipper

A more universal solution would be useful though

[0] https://github.com/zadam/trilium

I use 'w3m -dump' to keep articles in a directory in my memex.

This looks great for when I am on desktop. Would love to have a workflow for mobile — e.g i see an article and click the Share button and pick an iOS shortcut or some app on the share sheet that grabs the text content and copies to clipboard , then I dump to my favorite notes app

Emails are the perfect tool for that, but I got tired of opening my email client to email myself and built an app instead : https://boomerang-app.io . I am using it mainly to save HN link as well :)

Sounds all good until the email providers start filtering out emails as spam for no reason.

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