Software recommendation – Omnivore

It has been night days since I tried out the Omnivore and I am falling in love with it. It is an open-source read-it-later software that has very complete functionaility and very good design. From my user experience, I didn’t experience anything inconvenient/unconfortable when trying to incorporate it into my workflow. Although I’ve only used Omnivore for night days, it has already brought huge value to me, which I would like to write about now.

I use rss to collect information from many different sources, sources from esteemed press like Scientific American to personal blogs of other people. Most of the time I have hunderds of feeds in the inbox and I can’t savour on one particular article in face of many potentially interesting contents left undiscoverd. Short commentaries or project sharing feeds can be dealed with instantly, long articles explaining a specific topics are oftern too much effort to read and I need dedicated time for them.

So most of the time I save the link of the article in Linkding (my bookmark service) and hope that I will read it later. But the reality is that I won’t be revisiting them afterwards because there are many small frictions on the path to read — I need to enter Linkding, find the “read-it-later” tag, open the website (possibly also need to consent to Cookie), copy the quote when I find it interesting, add an additional note page in Obsidian for that article if I have some thoughts when reading it, etc, etc. Reading articles online was not a hassle-free experience that you can jump into without worrying about anything

it has then solwly become a process of creating invisible loads to your subconscious mind: “Ahh, this is a good article, but you already have something 7 days ago not read, you should have read that …”.

Let me be honest, while finding those good writer’s and opinions is suppose to be enjoyable, the joy quickly becomes mental burden unless you can’t find time processing them. As more feeds coming in everyday, the load piles up and eventually ruin my desire to have a look at those long articles.

Omnivore serves as a good tool to allow me review those valuable blog/articles easily after I’ve collected them.

But I don’t read them much because there is always something new coming and I often don’t have large chunks of time to sit down specifically for the article reading. In retrospect, I would say collecting good information should be a seperated process from processing them and I used to

• [ ] not finished yet

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