Wallabag, one year later
Last year I wrote about switching my read-it-later service to Wallabag. A read-it-later service lets you save web pages and blog posts to a personal online repository so you can read them later, when you have the time.
I’ve said this before. This type of service is valuable to me, because it lets me create my own little pond of information from the vast ocean that is the internet.
Alongside Wallabag, I also maintained a paid Pocket account, although I was slowly losing hope in Pocket’s deteriorating service, and then six months to the day of writing my post, Mozilla shut down Pocket. Which means that there are only two read-it-later services left – Instapaper and Wallabag.
How did Wallabag perform?
While it isn’t as pretty as Pocket, Wallabag turned out to be a workhorse. I rely heavily on the Firefox extension to save articles I find online to Wallabag, and I use the Android app on my Lenovo tablet to read these saved articles.
Over the past year, my Wallabag database has collected 4263 entries, of which I have read 1342 of them. Wallabag says I read about 3.3 articles a day on average, and of the 1342 articles I read in 2025, I marked 355 as favourites.
I had a brief scare when the Wallabag Apps on my phone and android suddenly stopped updating the articles I was adding. Some sort of oauth problem that I could not get past. The problem persisted for a little over a month and one day, it simply started working again. During this time, I just continued using Wallabag through my tablet’s web browser. That was handy!
Tagging Articles
I try to tag articles whenever I can, though realistically, I tag only about 25% of the articles that I save to Wallabag. Tagging requires a few moments of thinking because I have to decide on the right set of tags. Even though the Wallabag Firefox extension provides autocomplete for tags, I tend to skip tagging. Sometimes, I bulk add tags later, directly in Wallabag.
The contexts in which tags are useful are when I am trying to learn about a subject. It’s great to pull up everything that is tagged writing and see only those articles, and then switch to favourites, so you only see your favourite pieces on writing. Bread and butter tag usage.
The other scenario is when I want to act on an article. I use the tag 1a_process to tag articles that have information that I can act on. Typical examples are snippets of code I can use, cooking recipes, lists of books I need to buy and specialised workflows I need to follow.
Wallabag also offers tagging rules that allow for saved articles to be automatically tagged. For instance, I can have a rule that looks like
domainName = "https://psyche.co/"
and associate the tag mind to it. This means, any article I save from psyche.co will automatically be tagged with mind.
I have not used tagging rules so far.
Highlighting articles
When I used Pocket, I highlighted articles a lot. One reason was that I used a javascript bookmarklet that would copy these highlights from Pocket’s web view to my clipboard. I would then paste these into my notes.
I highlight far less on Wallabag because I haven’t yet figured out how to grab these highlights. I tried reverse engineering Phil Newton’s bookmarklet, but it turned out to be beyond my abilities. Maybe I should ask an LLM if it can figure out a way.
Unlike Pocket, Wallabag allows you to annotate these highlights. I don’t use this feature much.
Wombag for Emacs
My workflow remains the same as I described in my previous post, with the only change being in the tools I use. Back then I used Zim-wiki and Markor. Now I use Emacs and the android app for Obsidian.
Wombag, a Wallabag client for Emacs, in particular, has turned out to be really useful. I find it far easier to search my corpus of saved articles on Wombag than through Wallabag web or through the Android apps. Since Wombag is on Emacs, and since Emacs provides god-like powers over text, it is very easy to clip interesting information from these saved articles and store them as reference notes on my system. Once these notes are on my system, they are synced across all my devices and Obsidian lets me access these reference notes when I am away from my desk.
Exporting from Wallabag
Wallabag exports to an extensive list of formats including the expected epub, pdf, and txt formats, and also unexpectedly, json, xml and csv. I select a tag, say writing, and then export all the articles that have that tag as an epub book. A convenient way to have a packaged bundle of all my favourite pieces.
Wallabag or Bust
One year in, I can say that Wallabag has really grown on me. I don’t miss, or even think about Pocket anymore, and considering I used Pocket for almost two decades, that says something.
Since I have self-hosted Wallabag, I sometimes worry about losing my data and have to remember to back up the database. Small anxieties. If this eventually gets to me, I will consider using their paid service over at Wallabag.it. The paid service would cost me about Rs.160 a month, about 2k a year, which is not bad at all for the value Wallabag provides me. (In comparison, Instapaper would cost me about Rs.550 a month, about 6.6k a year.)