Using FreshRSS with Omnivore [Guest Post]
Today’s article is a guest post from our community member Riiku. He was so excited about using Omnivore with FreshRSS that he wrote this up, and with a few edits, we are pleased to present it here.
After leaving Twitter, my main source of news and cool stuff, I had to find another way to get informed and receive news and updates from the things I like. After seeing a trend that is growing quite fast of "old" tech coming back, I stumbled upon RSS, which I had tried using some years ago.
Really Simple Syndication, or RSS for short, is a well-known way to receive updates and follow stuff you like. It's been around for some time, almost 25 years now (wow). A surprisingly large number of people have used it from its inception to this day. Sadly, I didn't start sooner, so I'm still discovering the amazing things you can do with it and some awesome blogs to follow.
But there were some questions I needed to answer: How do I make it a part of my workflow? And how do I integrate it with my Omnivore library, since Omnivore is my main reader?
FreshRSS was the answer. An open-source RSS reader that is just amazing, with so many options and customizations. Sadly, it doesn’t have a good Android app, but there are other apps that integrate with it like FeedMe. which I use for mobile. The FreshRSS site has a list of other mobile apps for both Android and iOS.
But wait, doesn't Omnivore have RSS functionality already? Why do I need another app/service for RSS?
Glad you asked! Well, since I'm subscribed to 80+ sources, I get about 400 articles a day, mostly daily news. I personally use Omnivore as an article reader, mainly for long articles and interesting stuff I stumble upon that I want to save for a long time, and doing that with 400 articles a day would clutter my library REALLY fast. So I use FreshRSS to collect everything, then filter only what I want to keep into Omnivore.
So let's talk about how to integrate Omnivore and FreshRSS. It's actually super easy, there is only one prerequisite: A running FreshRSS instance. Setting up FreshRSS is beyond the scope of this article, but there are good instructions on their site for how to either use an existing server or build your own. Once you have that going, you can just install both apps, FeedMe and Omnivore, on your phone, and within the FeedMe settings page, in the Integrations tab, enable Omnivore:
Every time you open an article, a cute little Omnivore button will appear in the bottom bar. Clicking that will trigger the Share to Omnivore action, and save your article.
As an added bonus, you can set FeedMe to download your articles so you can have both your Omnivore library and your RSS feeds available offline!
With this setup, I can receive all the feeds I want within FreshRSS and get an overview of them. Then, if I find something I want to save for later, I can easily move it to Omnivore and have all of the tools available there for reading, highlighting, or note-taking.
Thanks, Riiku, for sharing how you integrate Omnivore with FreshRSS. If any of you, readers, have any cool workflows you’ve built with Omnivore and other tools, let us know!