<story><title>Pocket gets worse the more you use it (2019)</title><url>https://web.archive.org/web/20190512092903/https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/5x2sfx/pocket_it_gets_worse_the_more_you_use_it/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hamsterbase</author><text>Most &amp;quot;read it later&amp;quot; services save web pages on their servers, which cannot preserve paywalls, ad-free content, pages that require login or registration, and pages on a local network.&lt;p&gt;Sharing why I decided to develop my own &amp;quot;read it later&amp;quot; software.&lt;p&gt;1. I have a habit of saving web pages I like, most of which are in MHTML format, some are saved as single-file HTML, and others are web archives saved on iOS. Altogether, I have accumulated thousands of them.&lt;p&gt;2. On my computer, I can preview them one by one, but I cannot search through them. So, I developed a Node.js service that parses web pages locally and stores them in an SQLite FTS for full-text search. I deployed the service using Docker on my NAS.&lt;p&gt;3. To enhance my learning experience, I also developed an annotation feature that allows me to make notes and annotations directly on the offline HTML. For good articles, I save them to read slowly over time.&lt;p&gt;4. Gradually, the app gained some users. Since they were not familiar with Docker, I wrapped it with Electron and developed a standalone desktop version. The desktop version and Docker version use CRDT for peer-to-peer synchronization.&lt;p&gt;5. Some users provided feedback that it was inconvenient to annotate after saving, so I developed an open-source browser extension. Users can now annotate web pages directly in the browser, and the annotations and snapshots are saved automatically. When visiting the page again in the future, previous annotations can be restored.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>asaddhamani</author><text>Yesterday I was on a flight so I downloaded some paywalled articles on my phone using safari reading list. Once we took off and I lost connectivity I opened the article and saw - the paywall page. I tried looking for mobile read later apps that save offline and save what I saw not what their servers see, but not much luck.&lt;p&gt;I’ve my own app which can save pages as I saw them and create reader views out of them, but no offline access yet. This is a pretty niche use case but I feel these days more and more decent writing is behind paywalls (Substack and newsletters) so the current read it later apps are losing usefulness and they’re all frozen on features.</text></comment>
<story><title>Pocket gets worse the more you use it (2019)</title><url>https://web.archive.org/web/20190512092903/https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/5x2sfx/pocket_it_gets_worse_the_more_you_use_it/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hamsterbase</author><text>Most &amp;quot;read it later&amp;quot; services save web pages on their servers, which cannot preserve paywalls, ad-free content, pages that require login or registration, and pages on a local network.&lt;p&gt;Sharing why I decided to develop my own &amp;quot;read it later&amp;quot; software.&lt;p&gt;1. I have a habit of saving web pages I like, most of which are in MHTML format, some are saved as single-file HTML, and others are web archives saved on iOS. Altogether, I have accumulated thousands of them.&lt;p&gt;2. On my computer, I can preview them one by one, but I cannot search through them. So, I developed a Node.js service that parses web pages locally and stores them in an SQLite FTS for full-text search. I deployed the service using Docker on my NAS.&lt;p&gt;3. To enhance my learning experience, I also developed an annotation feature that allows me to make notes and annotations directly on the offline HTML. For good articles, I save them to read slowly over time.&lt;p&gt;4. Gradually, the app gained some users. Since they were not familiar with Docker, I wrapped it with Electron and developed a standalone desktop version. The desktop version and Docker version use CRDT for peer-to-peer synchronization.&lt;p&gt;5. Some users provided feedback that it was inconvenient to annotate after saving, so I developed an open-source browser extension. Users can now annotate web pages directly in the browser, and the annotations and snapshots are saved automatically. When visiting the page again in the future, previous annotations can be restored.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>poisonborz</author><text>Looks cool, but writing &amp;quot;pay for what you need&amp;quot; and no pricing info on the page is really off-putting.</text></comment>