A Newsboat Bookmarking Plugin for Evernote

Thursday, February 22, 2018 · 2 min read

I’ve been using newsboat to keep up with blogs and other news. I wrote a small plugin to bookmark articles I read in newsboat to Evernote.

Newsboat?

Newsboat is an open source RSS reader for your terminal.

I’ve used RSS readers for over a decade to keep track of news and blogs. It’s most useful because you can keep a simple record of what you’ve read, and get all of your reading in a single place. For blogs and other syndicated content that I want to keep up with, RSS is usually easiset. Back in the day this was all the rage, but a lot of sites have removed the easy access to their feed. The good news is that feeds are autimatically generated by almost all blog software, so usually you can find a feed by typing /feed or /rss to the end of a blog URL.

It keeps things easy and let’s me keep up with the latest on tech news and some of my favorite blogs, even the ones that only post sporadically.

Evernote Bookmark Plugin

Newsboat has a built in bookmarking feature that allows you to save a link. It uses a plugin system to let users easily send bookmarks to the app of their choice.

There are a few in the main repo contrib folder that show an implementation for Pinboard and a few other services. I use Evernote as a general purpose store-for-later box, but there wasn’t a Newsboat plugin to save bookmarks to Evernote.

Luckily, it was easy enough to make one with a few lines of bash script.

I used geeknote, a command line utility for Evernote, so it was a matter of just piping in the correct content to geeknote’s flags.

Here is the plugin:

#!/bin/bash
#basic newsboat bookmark plugin for evernote

url="$1"
title="$2"
description="$3"
feed_title="$4"

content="${url}"$'\n'"${description}"$'\n'"${feed_title}"

geeknote create --title "${title}" --content "${content}"