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Comment by dewey | Hacker News Reader

In my regular RSS reader I often have the problem that some feeds are not full feeds, or some images are missing (In case they have some gallery) and I have to click out to the page, even just to verify I got the full text. That always kinda stops me from going the eink route where I don’t have a proper browser.

Depends on which feeds you subscribe to I guess, probably works really well for long form, reliable feeds.

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A majority of the feeds I subscribe to do not include the full text in the feed themselves which is one of the main reasons I use Miniflux which has an option to fetch the full article text and works very reliably. Of the more than 150 feeds I am subscribed to, I think there are fewer than 5 that Miniflux is unable to fetch the text for. Miniflux can also connect to Wallabag to quickly save pages to it using the full text. That is great because Wallabag is often unable to fetch text directly on its own.

I’m also a happy user of Miniflux and that specific feature. I still sometimes want to click out to the article easily to double check if it feels like something didn’t parse correctly. Rare but happens.

One way to get around this in some cases is to subscribe to the feed's associated email newsletter, which, IME, is more likely to have the full text of the article. This, of course, introduces other problems[1], but if your goal is to remove reasons to habitually look at your phone, it's worth investigating.

[1] The feed needs to have a newsletter in the first place, you probably need to clean up the markdown a bit before shoving it into an epub (I've noticed that table-based layouts are much more common, for instance), and your email provider probably doesn't provide an RSS feed of your inbox. The latter two are straightforward to fix but do require a bit of programming elbow grease.

I built a RSS feed hydrator just for this. It grabs the basic feed and adds whatever I need to it.

Then it generates a new one that I subscribe to on my feed reader.

Have you made this open source? I really want something like this. Bonus points if it lets me add filters, etc. I want to read my local newspaper, but like half of the stories are about high school sports, of which I have absolutely zero interest.

It's called w3m (or lynx). No seriously. Not kidding. While I'm trying to be snarky, I recently discovered how well it works to do exactly what you are asking. Sites that need javascript, or are paranoid cloudflare prisons won't work, but otherwise it works quite well.

For walls of text (long substack articles) I still prefer epub, and use https://codeberg.org/neo1/mkebook which I wrote, but if you love the terminal: w3m. Filters are done by your rss reader, newsboat has boat loads of options, but any decent one should.

Defuddle (https://github.com/kepano/defuddle) by @kepano (CEO of Obsidian) is pretty damn good at getting a text-only version of random sites.

Defuddle looks interesting, I will try it out. Thanks for pointing it out!

There is another tool that on the surface appears similar to Defuddle called trafilatura: https://github.com/adbar/trafilatura It was OK, but I wasn't happy with it, as it kept stripping the comments sections.

It's 110% vibe engineered, so I'm rather hesitant to share it to anyone else - I don't need the drama =)

But it's pretty much a bespoke handler for every site with some common bits (caching, feed fetching etc)

For example: the HN handler uses the Algolia API to grab "front page" articles, filters them by score and comment count, grabs the link and gets any opengraph data from the link. Then the feed item contains some context for the linked site + post score + comment count.

This way I can make the decision whether to open it or hit next right in my RSS reader.

I have similar handlers for lobsters, tildes, youtube etc. along with a "meh" attempt of a daily AI generated summary for noisy sites like Verge, Ars Technica etc. who publish a dozen or more articles per day. The system grabs all those, combines the ones about the same subject and summarises the content.

But yea, it's open source. 99% of the stuff I build is public on my Github with a permissive license.

I really like the idea of reading blogs on my Kindle, so I built https://inkfeed.xyz

It's a web-based RSS reader optimized for e-ink devices (especially Kindles) that allows you to read blogs online via the Kindle browser, and download the blogs (directly on your Kindle or email it to your Kindle email).

And it does support fetching the full article using Mozilla's readability package!

Please try it and let me know what you think!

Have you tested it with Kobo devices?

No, I only have a Kindle, but if it's compatible with the Kindle browser then it may be compatible with Kobo as well.

If you have a Kobo device can you try it please?

It's a neat idea. I think it needs some feedback wheb you click to choose. I asked for an article in mobi as a test, and it was 30 seconds for it to give it to me. I thought it was borked.

Maybe a "queuing" or something? It let me do other things until it was ready, like download the epub.

Were you logged in or not?

If you were not logged in, then the conversation happens on the Kindle itself so yeah it's gonna be slow.

If you were logged in and the "backend mode" was enabled, then the delay will most likely be fetching the article images, compressing them and converting them to jpeg on the backend, but there's a setting to choose if you want to embed images or not.

I wasn't logged in, and it was just my Android phone. I was testing.

I know what the delay was for, I mentioned it in my original reply. My point is, there's no visual indicator of what's happening. You click the button, and you don't know if the button's been clicked. The person wonders, "Did I miss?" So I, as anyone would, clicked again after a moment. And again. Still no indication.

I then moved on, looked at other options, clicked the epub, downloaded that, then the mobi option popped up.

Again, it looks neat. I'm just saying "put some feedback to indicate the button press worked", especially if it's an op which can take some time. It's standard UI stuff.

Good luck BTW, seems like a nice project.

It usually takes less time than that with backend mode on, but yeah you're right I should put some kind of an indicator for it.

Thanks for the feedback and the compliment!

An Android eink device would solve this problem. I'd like recommendations.

I've been using a Supernote Manta for the past month and I love it. It's not a full-on computer, and it has its own UI that discourages you from treating it like one, but it is in fact an Android device. I've installed Syncthing and a few other small niceties, and it is amazing to be able to carry a big collection of PDFs around with me that I've curated on my laptop, desktop, phone. One of the "native" apps is Amazon Kindle, which is great, because I occasionally want to read one of those books on a bigger screen. The pen is good, and feels fine, although I prefer the feel of the ReMarkable.

Downside: there is no backlight. Others claim that the screen updates are too slow to make typing practical, but I personally don't think that. I installed termux and I think it's fine. Screen updates are no worse than SSH over a cellphone connection. I have not really found a good RSS reader for it yet, though...

Boox is fantastic. I have the Palma and it's been very enjoyable, since it's pocketable and has excellent power management, so despite being android, the battery can last 1-2 weeks.

Boox devices are nice, and the stock e-book reader is actually quite good.

The firm's support is decidedly sub-par, however, should you encounter issues. I'd advise not splurging on their higher-end (larger) devices on the potential lost investment. Though a 13" screen is quite delish for reading technical articles.

There's also the GPL compliance question.

https://rcarmo.github.io/projects/picoflux/ fixes that for me.

How? Seems like just a fork without PG won’t won’t fix buggy feeds. I already have Postgres running on my server so the DB isn’t a selling point for me.

Mine expands truncated feeds.

Miniflux also does that, you just have to enable it by feed or by default.

> Fetches the original article and extracts only the relevant content using a local Readability parser.

The really annoying ones are substack as it often wants you to sign in to access even free full text posts.

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