Read It Never

Read It Never Plugin for Obsidian

A rebranded fork of ReadItLater by Dominik Pieper.

Table of contents

• Introduction
• Installation
• Content Types
  • Website Article
  • Youtube
  • Youtube Channel
  • Twitter
  • Bilibili
  • Xiaoyuzhou
  • Podcast (RSS feed)
  • Text Snippet
• API

Introduction

Save the web with Read It Never plugin for Obsidian. Archive web pages for reading later, referencing in your second brain or for other flexible use case Obsidian provides.

Read It Never can do a lot more than converting web pages to markdown. For every content type there is specific template with carefully selected variables to ease up your archiving process.

What makes Read It Never plugin great?

• Simple, but powerful template engine
• Carefully selected predefined template variables to straightforward archiving process
• Compatibility with Obsidian iOS and Android apps
• Downloading images from articles to your Vault
• Batch processing of URLs list

Installation

This plugin is distributed outside the Obsidian community store.

Via BRAT (recommended): add the beta plugin leweii/read-it-never.

Manual: download main.js, manifest.json, and styles.css from the latest release into <vault>/.obsidian/plugins/read-it-never/, then enable Read It Never in Settings → Community plugins.

How to use Read It Never plugin?

To create single note you can either click on the plugin ribbon icon, select Read It Never: Create from clipboard from command palette or click on Read It Never shortcut in context or share menu. You can also create multiple notes from batch of URLs, delimited by selected delimiter in plugin settings using Read It Never: Create from batch in clipboard command.

If you want just add content to existing note, you can use Read It Never: Insert at the cursor position command to insert content after the current cursor position.

Template engine

Read It Never provides for every content type dedicated template that can be edited in plugin settings.

Variables

Variables are rendered in template using familiar syntax {{ content }}. Nested data types can be accessed using dot notation {{ author.name }}.

Filters

Variables output can be modified using filters. Filters are separated by | symbol. Filters can be chained, so output of the previous is passed to the next.

Adds quote prefix to each line of value.

Modifies first character to uppercase and others to lowercase.

{{ 'hello world'|capitalize}}

outputs: Hello world

Converts number to lexified format.

{{ 12682|numberLexify}}

outputs: 12.6K

Converts value to lowercase.

{{ 'Hello World'|lower}}

outputs: hello world

Replaces all occurrences in input value.

{{ 'Hello world'|replace('o') }}

outputs: Hell wrld

Converts value to uppercase.

{{ 'Hello World'|upper}}

outputs: HELLO WORLD

Inbox and Assets directories

You can use template variables in Inbox dir and Assets dir settings to better distribute content in your Vault.

Content Types

Structure of note content is determined by URL. Currenty plugin supports saving content of websites and embedding content from multiple services. Each content type has title and note template with replacable variables, which can be edited in plugin settings.

Available content types are ordered by URL detection priority.

Website Article

Will be parsed to readable form using Mozilla Readability and then converted to markdown. In case website content is marked by Readbility as not readable, empty note with URL will be created.

If enabled, images will be downloaded to folder (default is Read It Never Inbox/assets) configured in plugin settings. (Supported only on desktop for now)

Youtube

Parsing of HTML DOM has its limitations thus additional data can be fetched only from Google API. Retrieved API key can be set in plugin settings and then plugin will use the Google API for fetching data.

Youtube Channel

X.com (Twitter)

Parser use X Publish API to fetch data.

Bilibili

Metadata is fetched from Bilibili's public x/web-interface/view API (no login required).

Xiaoyuzhou

Matches episode pages on xiaoyuzhoufm.com (小宇宙), e.g. https://www.xiaoyuzhoufm.com/episode/<id>.

Metadata is scraped from the episode page's embedded __NEXT_DATA__ JSON (no login or official API required).

Podcast (RSS feed)

Matches URLs that look like a podcast RSS/Atom feed (ending in .xml/.rss, or containing a /feed or /rss path segment). The note is generated from the most recent <item> in the feed, so this works for podcast platforms other than Xiaoyuzhou as long as you paste the feed URL rather than an episode page.

Text Snippet

If your clipboard content is not recognized by any of above parsers plugin will create note with unformatted clipboard content.

API

To invoke functionality from other plugins we provide an API. You can access it via this.app.plugins.plugins['read-it-never'].api which is an instance of ReadItNeverApi class defined in src/ReadItNeverApi.ts.