What is your workflow for processing articles: discovery, saving for later, actually reading them, annotating, highlighting, archiving? What tools do you use? I’m not talking about research papers. I’m asking more generally about article consumption from news sites, blog posts etc.
For me, this has been causing quite a headache to figure out what tools to use. One of the issues is that it’s hard to find a good reading app that’s free and offers good functionality. Previously, I relied on Omnivore, but it was shut down recently. Now I’m thinking the best way would be to save important articles as PDFs and import them into Logseq or some other second-brain app for further processing and long-term storage. But this has its own issues: the process is not automatic, the PDFs can be poorly formatted. The ideal set up for me would be: I click a button in Firefox and get a nice, clean extracted article added to some page in Logseq with all the metadata ready for reading.
In my opinion. I find it cleaner to keep it on another server instead of importing it into Logseq. The reason is that importing into Logseq would increase resources and further bloat the graph. I don’t think it is desirable to add more than my own writing to the graphs.
I intend to move to Infoflow as Omnivore.app has declared the end of its service. The app is still in its development phase: the web-based version was released a month ago and is still undergoing frequent updates. (At the moment, due to a bug, you cannot send URLs using the browser extension. You have to add a new one from within the app screen). Incidentally, unlike Omnivore.app, both free and paid plans exist.
My flow is based on cost-based Readwise Reader (read-later-app):
Throughout the day: gathering interesting input (tweeds, newsfeeds, newsletters, pdf etc) whenever I stumble upon it - mostly without reading it.
Later, typically next day, go through Readers inbox and decide on deleting or reading it later
Actually reading stuff in Readers “later” library.
In case it is related to topics stored in logseq, highlight and annotate.
Readwise pluging pulls it into logseq, where I frequently visit this input (listed by query), introduce links to other stuff, add more thoughts, place additional tags etc.
In the beginning I was tempted to highlight everything that seems to be interesting, ending up with way too many content in logseq, which was “diluting” my 2nd-brain content.
I agree completely that it’s best to save content on another server. I think there needs to be a separation between the notes you create yourself and the source material.
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I’ve been using Zotero for 16 years for that purpose. No other open-source software comes even close. It’s the backbone of my work process. I started using Logseq a year ago, and I was delighted to find that it integrates with Zotero nicely.
While Zotero is designed for research use, it works great for saving website snapshots as well. So give it a go!
I have tried it. The thing with Zotero is that it saves the whole page as a snapshot. What I want (when dealing with articles specifically) is to get the reading view saved as a PDF. Do you know an easy way do this?
Not sure what you mean by “reading view”. Something like Firefox’s Reader view functionality? You can print it as PDF on the browser, and then save as an attachment in Zotero, but perhaps you were looking for a more streamlined workflow?
I use a RSS reader for casual reading, and then save webpage snapshots in Zotero for stuff I want to come back to later.
Yes, I meant “reading view” as in Firefox’s Reader view. And you are correct; I’m looking for a more streamlined solution, because there are a lot of steps to get the “reading view” PDF in Zotero. And I would prefer Zotero would have this kind of copy because I intend to read it and annotate.
I see. I think you’re out of luck there. There’s a plugin called ZotFile, which adds an item to the right-click context menu in Zotero, and lets you attach the most recent PDF in the Downloads folder to the current item in Zotero. Maybe that helps a little bit.