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Comment by raybb | Hacker News Reader

When I use a tool like this one of the most important things is that it works offline so I can read something in a plane or on the go.

I've looked into most of these (and instapaper, pocket, etc) and ultimately found Wallabag to be the best. However, their app is quite buggy and site is fairly clunky for my taste. Luckily there's a pretty recent 3rd party client that works offline super well and is on Mac/Linux/android/iOS for free (yay flutter) https://github.com/casimir/frigoligo

Also, I'll note that it's basically a must to use the browser extension with the option to download via what the browser sees if you get content from a lot of sites. That being said the devs are super responsive to reports that sites aren't being scraped appropriately.

My biggest wish is that they supported YouTube (at least titles) and they had a way to indicate when a article needs to be scraped client side.

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I've had wallabag on my radar for quite a while, but I keep ending up on "... but what even is it?".

Obviously it archives things for later reading. It works great for that on my e-reader, and I'm super glad it exists and KOReader supports it.

But the API[1] is largely undocumented and undescribed, so I'm kinda at a loss as to what the goals and possibilities are, because the app leaves quite a lot to be desired for e.g. replacing personal cataloguing on something Delicious-like. It seems tailor made for small, barely-customizable offline reading (save it for reading later, maybe with tags, then archive it and don't look at it again), despite the API apparently (maybe?) offering a lot more (but not describing it so it's hard to know how it's intended to be used).

Is there, like... documentation somewhere? Particularly with capabilities / intent / goals? I'm hesitant to sink much time into it without some idea of how it thinks of itself, building a bowl of Hyrum-slaw on top of a shaky foundation is no fun for anyone involved. If it's mostly just what the core app presents, it's probably not what I want.

[1]: https://app.wallabag.it/api/doc/ and https://doc.wallabag.org/developer/api/methods/

Now that I think about it, maybe I can write a little side script to fetch the YouTube titles and update it.

On a plane?, do you self-host in your laptop? Or is the client having a full copy of everything, incl. images?

I don't self-host on a laptop but the client does save a lot offline including images. I assume it's just the "unread" content but I haven't actually looked into that.

thanks for the app recomendation, didnt know about it yet..

regarding youtube, my youtube links saved with wallabager browser extension always show the correct title, are you using something else to save them?

Oh good point it does work with the browser extension. I was experiencing this when trying to add them from my phone.

Why is Wallabag better than pocket?

Imo it's only better if you expect stuff to be saved correctly for reading offline. Pocket often fails even with major news sites and just opens the link to the browser. That's a big pain for me.

Also, I don't love the ads and recommended content in Pocket.

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