There is too much content to sort through by hand: news sites put out ten articles a day, sections and reposts slip past your topics, and the article you need gets lost between them. But you can set up a rule by a keyword in the text. If an unwanted word turns up, the article is deleted or marked as read. If it is the word you need, the article goes to favourites or you get a notification.
There are many sources, and each brings more than you are ready to read. Some sources you do not read for every article but for one word in the text: a mention of your company, the name of a technology, the name of an author. Such things are easier to catch with a rule than to hunt down by hand.
You can filter with a second app too: Feedbro as an extra layer on top of your reader, siftRSS as a go-between. That is one more program to set up and keep in mind. In Readine rules are built in: they work on the server and act the same on all devices and across all types of sources, including Telegram and YouTube.
A rule matches on a field of the article: URL, title, tag or full text.
| What | Example |
|---|---|
| Noisy sites | ten articles a day, of which you need one |
| Off-topic sections | sections and reposts you do not read |
| Rare mentions | an important word that is easy to miss |
A rule consists of a condition and an action. The condition matches a field of the article — URL, title, tag or full text — against your value. The action applies to the article as a whole: delete, add to favourites, mark as read, remove all tags, add a tag, export, send a push or a notification by email.
Notifications can be batched over a time window, and one notification gives you a list of links. That also reduces the amount of noise.
One rule can be applied to all feeds at once or to several chosen feeds. There is no need to copy it for each feed.
Ads and site chrome are stripped from every article — no rule is needed for that. As a result the article becomes visually cleaner and more comfortable to read.
| Action | What happens to the article |
|---|---|
| Delete | the article is deleted from the feed |
| Add to favourites | it is marked with a star |
| Mark as read | fewer unread articles |
| Remove all tags | all tags are removed from the article; a later rule can add the tag you need |
| Add tag(s) | the chosen tag or tags are added to the article |
| Export | the article file is saved to cloud storage: Dropbox, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive or Yandex Disk; the file format is HTML or DOCX |
| Send a push notification | your push arrives with your text, batched over a window of 1 minute to 1 day |
| Send an email notification | an email arrives with your text and links to articles, batched over 3 hours to 1 day and delivered as a digest |
Start with one rule: cut the obvious junk out of new articles. Usually two or three words by the article text or tag are enough for the feed to become noticeably cleaner.
Then add tags and one condition for a rare word in the text. In the app you can list all articles from all feeds by a specific tag. Then, from that list, pick the articles that carry the second tag.
A rule is applied at the moment an article is added to the feed. So it only affects articles that arrive after you create it; it does not apply to articles already in the feed.
Q: Are rules paid?
A: Rules are paid for as separate modules, priced by the number of rules. You pay only for what you need.
Q: Do I need to create a rule for each feed?
A: No. One rule is applied to all feeds at once or to several chosen ones, and there is no need to copy it for each feed.
Q: Why does a new rule not work?
A: A rule triggers at the moment an article is added to the feed, so it only affects new articles and leaves those already in the feed untouched.
Q: What if a rule deletes something it should not?
A: You can change the action to adding a special tag. Then filter the list of articles with this tag and delete them by hand.
Q: Do filters work in Telegram and YouTube?
A: Yes. You can set a condition for any feed: an RSS site, Telegram, YouTube or Substack.
Q: Can filtered articles be exported?
A: Yes. There is an action for a rule — to save matching articles as files to cloud storage: Dropbox, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive or Yandex Disk. The file format is HTML or DOCX. Getting articles into Obsidian works differently: it is a separate module, and Obsidian pulls the files into your vault according to its own settings.
Q: How complex a rule can I create?
A: There are AND, OR conditions and nested groups of conditions. Text can be checked with contains/does not contain conditions. Tags can be compared for equality/contains/does not contain. Try the rule wizard — it makes things clearer. One caveat: no regular expressions.
10 feeds and 1 rule free for 3 weeks. No card needed.
Download Readine →