Reading Articles Later, without Paywalls
In an effort to 'keep up to date' and 'read every day', I've spend the last few years hopping from tool to service to try and find an intuitive way to organize articles I'm saving to read later.
From Slackbot and Newsboat to Pocket, and plenty of failed attempts my own in-between, I had all but given up - resorting to a weighty browser tab group, which was a pain to access between devices.
Obsidian + ReadItLater
In late 2022 I went on a trip overseas, and I was doing some planning in Obsidian (a simple / customizable notes app) and I came across the ReadItLater plugin. It allows you to save articles directly to markdown, with which a subscription to Obsidian means they're synced across your devices. There are a few third-party plugins for Obisidian to self-host and manage sync capabilities. Initially, I used this to save some information pages on the transport system for my trip. You simply copy a URL to your clipboard, and open the command pallete (Ctrl+P), and choose the "ReadItLater: Save clipboard" command.
Not long after, I thought, "Hey, I should probably save some stuff to read on the plane, or until I get a sim card?". So, I saved a few - noticing that since ReadItLater was using Mozilla's Readability to turn articles into markdown, I was getting past most of the paywalls I threw at it. A nice extra. It's become my go to for bypassing paywalls since 12ft.io doesn't often work for me anymore.
More fun with Obsidian
There are a few other features I really like that have sold me on Obsidian as a daily driver for planning:
- Code snippets - using ReadItLater, I like to download articles with code snippets (especially when on mobile), and apply syntax highlighting to them by editing the parsed markdown blocks.
- Multimedia Storage - I find it very useful to be able to store a variety of files alongside my notes, and easily link them in text with
[[A set of Double Braces]](especially when it comes to working with audio files and PDF). - Community plugins - there are a whole host of very interesting community plugins to turn Obsidian into anything from a study tool to a chess board.