Zettelkasten and second brain systems, episode 2758:
As I’m looking to streamline my information management workflows, I would love to find an RSS reader app or service which can…
- Extract full-text articles
- Highglight and annotate text
- Export highlights and annotations (ideally to Markdown)
I currently use Inoreader which does the first two and half of point 3, but notes do not get exported. Feedly does not offer point 3 (that I’ve found). (I find it quite dumb to keep the notes captive in a reader app)
I know I could always open an article that I find I want to annotate in Diigo or Liner, but I would love if there existed something like Instapaper’s annotation feature (which is both very simple and awesome: annotate, highlight, send the content as Markdown to anything you want), all in order to minimize friction.
Am I looking for a unicorn here…?
Thanks 
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Just some more detail on Feedly and #3: Feedly’s backup feature can backup your articles, highlighted, in HTML or PDF format, via Dropbox. However, the resulting files are not technically annotated—they’re just flat versions of the articles with visible highlighting. So, you can’t do anything easy to extract ‘em. So close, yet so far.
Your answer, though, is DEVONthink! DEVONthink is an excellent RSS tool, and you can convert and do all kinds of automatic actions on your files with it. It would solve all three of the above tasks handedly.
…however, and as ever, mobile work with this solution is limited by the hamstrung DEVONthink To Go. You can get workable scenarios here using DEVONthink’s indexing (e.g., if you save RSS’d articles to an indexed folder, it creates filesystem files for each article. If that indexed file is in a cloud sync location, you then have relatively easy access to it on mobile, even if you didn’t have DTTG installed.
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Thank you for that detailed write-up! I will admit, as I was writing my post, I had a nagging thought DT could maybe help – and I didn’t know it could extract full articles from partial RSS feeds, which is really cool. I really need to dive deeper into that side of things.
The snag is, I process RSS mostly on mobile… and as the whole world, I’m still waiting for the DTTG update. But it seems like the company is actively working on it at the moment, from what I gather on the forums.
Anyway, thanks a lot for your help – I will definitely dig deeper into DT’s RSS management!
Ah, yes, then that snag is harsh. Especially because you’ll probably need DT3 running on a desktop somewhere to get full articles.
To wit, I should have included an additional disclaimer. There are workarounds to grab full-text from truncated articles, but it isn’t perfect. Thankfully it can get pretty close with automation. See this thread on the DEVONthink forums: https://discourse.devontechnologies.com/t/dt3-rss-opening-links-possibly-automatically/54819
I actually think I made the script that I mention for expanding link-only RSS items into full items… let me know if you need it and I’ll dig it up!
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Thank you very much for the pointers! Before delving too much in this direction and setting possible workarounds, I think I will wait to see what DTTG 3 brings – I’m not in a real hurry (was hoping that maybe a RSS reader app was already doing this in and on itself) – with some luck the DT team might see the advantage of baking this solution in on mobile. If not, then I will dig deeper into using DT for this and then might pester you again 
Thank you for taking the time to point me in the right direction!
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You may wanna check out readwise.io/reader.
That seems to be what you are looking for!
They have an API, so not sure about the export formats.
DevonAgent might also be worth checking out since it is made for research and annotation
I’ve recently discovered that Inoreader has launched annotation features:
I haven’t tried it, though. I’m impatiently waiting for the beta to the Readwise Reader app nowadays.
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me too, it has been a while . Does anyone know when the beta will come out. If it is not coming in a next 3 months, I am considering subscribing to inoreader pro plan on a month to month basis.
Any one can offer any insight?
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