Read Later

Sun, 13 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Status

Active since July 2025.

What

A self-hosted bookmark/read-later service

Where

How

This service is setup as one of several virtual hosts on a virtual machine that is dedicated to a couple of these self-hosted things (the project page for is still WIP/AWOL for now).

To try and keep the maintenance requirements relatively low I used the docker approach, only sharing the data with the host system so that it is preserved over restarts and can be backed up regularly:

  docker run \
         --detach \
         --rm -ti \
         -p 6080:8000 \
         -v /var/www/readeck:/readeck \
         codeberg.org/readeck/readeck:latest

A fragment of the Apache configuration file:

  ProxyPreserveHost On
  ProxyPass / http://0.0.0.0:6080/
  ProxyPassReverse / http://0.0.0.0:6080/
  RequestHeader set X-Forwarded-Proto https

Disclaimer: I don't have a lot of experience with the proxy or proxy_http modules, so it's possible that could be done better. There are more complete instructions on the Readeck Deployment documentation page.

Integrating it:

For Firefox I use this Readeck add-on.
There is no iOS (or Android, for that matter) app but the (self-hosted) website can be added as a pseudo-app on iOS by using Safari's "Add to Home Screen".
That pseudo-app doesn't get you a "Share to …" entry, but thankfully there are acceptable workarounds (listed in the FAQ) in the form of shortcuts. It took a little bit of fidgeting to figure out how to configure the shortcut, but after that it was relatively smooth sailing.
Although it's somewhat redundant, I also created a script to check my Mastodon bookmarks and import new ones into Readeck. So if I'm in a hurry, I'll quickly bookmark a ~~post~~ toot, otherwise I'll use the "Send Page + Tags To Readeck" shortcut.

Code and related things

Originally I had planned to migrate from Instapaper (the read-later service I used for ~15 years) to a self-hosted Wallabag instance, but before the dust had even settled on that (meaning figuring out what browser add-on to use or how to integrate it on my phone) this post by Shom pointed me towards Readeck. That's why the scripts below have a migration path from Instapaper -> Wallabag -> Readeck, and not Instapaper -> Readeck.

My collection of scripts in this read-later repository.

wallabag_import.py: Iterate over the Instapaper entries and add them one by one to my (also self-hosted) Wallabag service. For the ~17k bookmarks that I had that took multiple hours and possibly got my IP in trouble with a few websites.
readeck_wallabag.py: Initiate a migration from Wallabag to Readeck (handled entirely by Readeck after that).
reprocess_readeck.py: Loop over all bookmarks in a Readeck collection, re-adding them and deleting the original ones as it goes.
bookmark_readeck.py: Check my Mastodon bookmarks and add any new ones to Readeck

Website

Mon, 13 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Status

Active in its current form since November 2023 and its current location since March 2025.

What

My personal website.

Where

Right here.

Content

Everything on here has been generated once by a so-called SSG and then dropped in place.

The content is generated with Hugo. I picked the Ananke theme, and made some minor modifications:

Modified the default Hugo RSS template (layouts/_default/rss.xml):
- Change the feed to include full posts instead of just the summary
- Add <category> tag(s)
Copied and modified the default single (post/project) page (layouts/_default/single.html):
- Include an optional "Updated …" bit after the original post date
- Move the context menu (with the table of contents and related posts) before the content, which places it to the left of the text, or at the top of page instead of at the bottom in a small screen situation
Copied and adapted the main page (layouts/index.html) just to make the text there not be centered.
Copied and adapted the footer (layouts/partials/site-footer.html) just so I could make the copyright years be a range instead of just the current year. I tried to put the beginning of the range in the copyright configuration setting but then that ended up looking funny in the RSS source

Beyond that, I've left the theme as-is and I'm taking advantage of its (and Hugo's) features.

Hosting

Until March 2025 the static site was hosted in an AWS S3 bucket, made available through a Cloudfront distribution to make it available via https.

At that point, I moved it to statichost.eu, which specializes in hosting SSGs, directly from Git repositories, and hosting it with http and https.

Keeping up with the Joneses?

As so often happens, I looked away for one minute (alright, closer to 4-5 months) and the version of Hugo that I get when I do a fresh install (from Brew) is a bit different than what I started with, and that is going to break some things.

To give myself a stable work environment and breathing space I decided to run the hugo command inside a quick'n'dirty container:

The Dockerfile

  FROM cibuilds/hugo:0.119.0

  EXPOSE 1313

A super simple Makefile

  hugo-docker:
          docker build --tag myhugo .

  server-beta:
          docker-helper server --bind 0.0.0.0 --environment beta

  server-live:
          ./docker-helper server --bind 0.0.0.0 --environment live

  deploy-beta:
          ./docker-helper --environment beta && ./docker-helper deploy --environment beta

  deploy-live:
          ./docker-helper --environment live && ./docker-helper deploy --environment live

And a shell script to glue it all together:
```
  #!/bin/sh

  if [ $# -eq 0 ]; then
      echo "Usage: $0 <hugo-arguments>" 1>&2
      exit 1
  fi

  DIR=$(git rev-parse --show-toplevel)
  docker run -v $HOME/.aws:/home/circleci/.aws -v $DIR:$DIR -p 1313:1313 -w $(pwd) -it myhugo hugo $*
```
That script fires up the container with only the current Git repo exposed within the container, and starting off at the current working directory as well, then running the hugo version that I grabbed. It also shares ~/.aws for the deployment steps.

Now I can run a command like this and I can sanity check that the site is going to look ok with that particular version, and then later figure out what needs to be fixed as I nudge the version along at my own pace:

make server-beta

And then deploy when I'm happy:

make deploy-live

Noting that now that I've moved to statichost.eu the deploy-* targets are obsolete, but it's still useful to test locally with server-*.

Docker on East of the Sun, West of the Moon

Read Later

Status

What

Where

How

Integrating it:

Code and related things

Website

Status

What

Where

Content

Hosting

Keeping up with the Joneses?