Ask HN: Does an RSS-based Read-It-Later service exist? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Does an RSS-based Read-It-Later service exist?

3 pointsfargoth4 comments

I've used Instapaper for a few years and appreciate the convenience of quickly sending articles to the platform.

However recently I've been consolidating my online consumption into an RSS feed reader. It would be nice to be able to send articles there instead. In the same way that kill-the-newsletter generates an RSS feed from emails, I'd like to generate an RSS feed of my saved articles. Does a service like this exist?

Ideally it would look like this:

1. Sign up for a service and generate my own unique RSS feed URL

2. Add this URL to my feed reader

3. Save articles with this service (for example with a Chrome extension or website form)

4. See my saved articles appear in my feed reader

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I've started using Readwise, which can take RSS feeds or OPML and it has a great API and a great app. Highly recommend. I'm not sure it generates an RSS feed, but you could request that as a feature, they're still in Beta. That said, I use their API to build my own RSS feed on my own static generated site to display read later items and make it so people can subscribe. If you're interested, my code for dealing with Readwise is here: https://github.com/AramZS/aramzs.xyz/blob/main/bin/enrichers... , though I'm still improving it and cleaning it up.

I use Raindrop for this purpose: https://raindrop.io/

Each collection can be made public with its own unique RSS feed or HTML page.

It doesn't scrape the article like Instapaper or Pocket, which I actually prefer since it keeps things simple and I can choose how I want to view the article.

The only downside I've found so far is that URLs must be unique to each feed, so you can have multiple feeds but you can't put the same URL into multiple feeds.

In case you weren't aware, Instapaper has an RSS feed of your saved articles. In your web browser (on desktop or ask for desktop version on mobile device) go to Instapaper.com and click on your username/email address in the upper right corner. Select download and a box pops up with several options -- select RSS feed and copy the URL over to yer favorite RSS reader.

Ray

I developed Lighthouse (https://lighthouseapp.io/) where you can do something similar.

It's an RSS feed reader, and there's a browser extension with which you can add articles to your library directly. You can of course also add articles manually in the web UI.

If I understood you correctly this may be what you're looking for.

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