url2epub VS omnivore

Somewhat similarly, I wrote a web app to generate epub (instead of pdf) out of urls and send to eink reader(s) directly (via a telegram bot) so I can read them. Currently it supports sending epub by email (for kindle) or uploading epub to dropbox (for kobo, etc.). It originally also supports reMarkable cloud but we can no longer make reMarkable cloud actually work. There's also a REST api to generate epub to be downloaded directly: https://github.com/fishy/url2epub/blob/main/REST.md

For e-ink readers epubs are generally better than PDFs for urls anyways, as epubs are basically packed htmls, and also the flow text works better on smaller screens.

I wrote a service (Google Cloud Run as the backend, with Telegram bot as the frontend) to generate readable ePub from URLs and send directly to e-ink readers. It was originally wrote for reMarkable 2 (using reMarkable cloud), I recently added support for Kindle (by using the send-to-kindle emails). The code is at https://github.com/fishy/url2epub and I blogged about the recently added kindle support at https://b.yuxuan.org/url2epub-kindle.

I'm open to suggestions on what other e-ink platforms to add, as long as they have a reasonable cloud API. I'm also looking for a good e-ink platform to move to personally, as it becomes apparent that reMarkable really doesn't want third parties to use their proprietary cloud "API".

2. It's a relatively open system (compared to other e-ink readers), so it's pretty fun in terms of hackability.

I did get the forever free subscription which helps, but I also totally understand why they would want to charge for that, and I think the new $3/month is a pretty reasonable price for it.

Regarding instapaper use case and also hackability, shameless plug: I wrote https://github.com/fishy/url2epub for my own use case, so instead of relying on a third party service and manually sync stuff to reMarkable 2, I just send the link to the telegram bot (I picked telegram bot so that I can easily send links from my phone, not only desktops), and the epub will be auto synced to my reMarkable cloud account (they did made some changes to the cloud api causing I have to manually open their official mobile or desktop app to sync once before the reMarkable 2 itself would accept the new epub I uploaded through url2epub, haven't figured out how to avoid that yet, but it's still mostly automated).

For reMarkable, I also wrote a Telegram bot to convert http url into ePub and send to reMarkable directly: https://github.com/fishy/url2epub

(if you don't like telegram or don't use reMarkable, it also comes with a public rest API to generate epub out of urls)

Shameless plug and this is only loosely related: Over the last holiday season I wrote a backend (written in Go and running on App Engine) to convert http url into epub. The frontend is a telegram bot that sends the epub to your reMarkable account directly, but it also has rest api to download the epub file: https://github.com/fishy/url2epub/blob/main/REST.md

With the purchase of reMarkable 2, I have this need to easily send web articles to my reMarkable 2 from my phone, while officially they only provided a Chrome extension, which can only be used on desktops.

As a result I wrote some go code (https://github.com/fishy/url2epub) for the past 2 days, to generate ePub from URL. I also implemented reMarkable API to send them to reMarkable tablets directly.

The current UI for it is implemented as a Telegram bot (https://t.me/url2rM_bot?start=1), running on AppEngine (code: https://github.com/fishy/url2epub/tree/main/appengine). I initially considered making an Android app for the UI, but decided that Telegram bot is less work for me, and works good enough for this use case (sorry for people who don't use Telegram, but this also means that people on iOS, desktop, etc. will be able to use it).

For the future, I might do:

- Expand the URLs supported (currently it only supports URLs with an AMP version provided, and the AMP version does have article tag inside)

Omnivore is a complete, open source read-it-later solution for people who like text.

If only they can add RSS support and newsletter subscriptions backed by Firefox Relay in Pocket, it can actually become a whole lot more useful.

If you need something like this today, try Omnivore[1]. Their RSS support is a bit wonky but very promising.

[1]: https://omnivore.app

Use https://omnivore.app/ it's free.

I'm quite happy with Omnivore: https://github.com/omnivore-app/omnivore

It's open source, I can host it myself it I want to but the reference hosted version on omnivore.app is free and quite reliable. Dark mode, progressive webapp, native apps, full text search, Obsidian integration, Pocket migration.

Compare that with instapaper: Terrible Android app that looks like Android apps from 2015, okayish iPad/iOS apps, quite expensive now, every interesting feature behind a paywall. I guess if you're into the minimalist aesthetic or if you've grown accustomed to it, sure, keep on using it. But it feels as if this product has been somewhat on extended life support and people would care a lot less if it wasn't run by Marco Arment.

I used to use Pocket extensively until I realized it wasn't going anywhere with features. I have since moved to Omnivore [1] and I couldn't be happier.

The devs are also ex-Pocket users and have worked hard to get feature parity and then some. There are mobile apps too for reading on the go (and work offline) which I use extensively when I am on flights. There is a graphql API and webhooks you can use for extending its functionality. Search could be a little better, but I use the labeling system which works well. I also use the logseq integration to keep a persistent log of articles I read on any given day.

[1] https://github.com/omnivore-app/omnivore

I briefly tried Omnivore and it seems to be have a good system for scraping web articles, especially for downloading them into Obsidian as markdown. I want to isolate that and have my script that that I can feed URLs into and get the contents as markdown files. I tried looking at the repo to see how it works and at this index.js file since the folder is called "puppeteer-parse". I tried reading it line by line multiple times it feels like too much to keep in my head at one, it makes me wonder how SWEs work with large codebases. I wonder if there are tools or ways to make reading large code files faster or easier.

This looks very nice, but self hosting requires reliance on google cloud.

https://github.com/omnivore-app/omnivore/issues/25