What Athenana does, and what each part of it is for. Every claim here has a shipped feature behind it — this page is written from the code rather than from a roadmap.
Five ways in, so nothing has to be retyped.
One click on any page saves it, with the screenshot taken by your browser — so a page behind a login or a paywall is captured as you actually saw it, which no server-side fetch can do.
Save from Safari, Mail, Messages or any other app on the phone, without an app to install or another account to sign into.
A dialog on every page of the app takes a link, a note, a highlight or a PDF, with its tags, without leaving what you were doing.
Import the bookmarks file any browser exports, or an export from Instapaper, Pocket or MyMind — zipped or not, and it works out which it is rather than asking you. MyMind also has a live sync that keeps picking up new ones.
Post from your own scripts with a token you issue and can revoke, or from any Micropub client — the same standard the IndieWeb tools speak.
You do nothing. It reads, tags and keeps.
Its text, its title, its description and its own preview image, stored here. When the original goes away — and things do — your copy is what is left, and the item says so.
Every saved article is read and summarised, so a title you no longer recognise arrives with a note of what the thing actually argues. It is written for you and stays yours unless you publish it on your blog, which is a switch you turn on yourself and which is off to begin with.
An archived page can be read on this site, rebuilt from what was already stored: no overlays, no navigation, nothing fetched from the original. Useful the day the original is gone, and most days before that.
Everything saved is read and tagged automatically against the vocabulary you have already built, rather than a generic one. Nothing arrives untagged and nothing needs filing.
A screenshot or a photograph of a page has its words read out of it, so an image is as findable as an article.
Save a song and the recording is found and shown with it, behind a cover you press to play.
Save an episode from Overcast or Apple Podcasts and it keeps the show, the title and how long it runs, and plays behind its own artwork when you press it.
An article can be read aloud on the page by a voice already on your own device, which asks nobody for anything. Or flag it and it is narrated properly and added to a private podcast feed — your own, in whatever podcast app you already use, for the walk rather than the desk.
While reading a saved article, send it to your Kindle as a book — with the page's own picture on the cover, the passages you kept at the end, and your note too if you tick the box. Save your Kindle address once; Amazon needs to be told the sender is you. Once it has gone, the same file can be downloaded for any other reader.
Saved pages are re-checked, and one that has died is marked as dead rather than left to be discovered the day you needed it.
Half a remembered phrase is enough.
Full text, across the page's own words as well as your titles, notes and tags. Short terms like AI and UX are findable too, which most full-text search quietly is not.
Name a search and it sits in the sidebar. It stores the question, never a fixed set of results, so it keeps answering as the collection grows.
Every tag is a board of its own, and the whole vocabulary is browsable — useful when you remember the shape of a thing but not its words.
A board for scanning many things at once, a list for reading down them one at a time, and a Random button for when you are not looking for anything in particular.
j and k walk the screen, Enter opens, s saves and / searches. A question mark lists them all, so nothing has to be memorised first.
The part of a collection that is actually yours.
Keep a note of your own, or pull a passage off a page — including straight out of the reader, where each passage you keep sits with its own switch for who may see it. Both are searchable and taggable like everything else, and both stay private unless you choose otherwise.
Say what you thought about a saved page, in Markdown, alongside it rather than in another app.
Give an item the picture it should be shown with, and give a note a gallery of its own — up to twelve.
Attach a YouTube video to any item. It plays behind a cover, so nothing loads from Google until you press it.
The vocabulary is yours; the machine works to it.
A tag you add by hand is kept when the item is read again, and one you remove is not put back.
New tags the machine wants to coin are held for you to accept or reject, so the vocabulary grows on purpose rather than by drift.
The rarest tags are pruned back nightly to keep the list navigable — but never one you applied by hand, and never one used in the last thirty days. If those alone fill the ceiling it prunes what it can and stops, rather than deleting the vocabulary you built.
Two spellings of one idea become one. Every destructive action shows you what it will do before it does it.
Reading that comes to you, without a river.
A daily reading list drawn from the topics you actually save, gathered from several sources and ranked, replaced each day so nothing piles up — with the last ninety mornings still there to look back through.
Add a topic it has not noticed, or drop one you are done with.
Nine a day from your own collection: what you saved and have not been back to in three months. Opening one puts it away for another three. The mirror of the morning paper — one draws on what you have not read, the other on what you meant to.
Feeds noticed while saving a page, plus any you add, refreshed daily — and nothing from them reaches your board on its own. You follow a link and save it if it is worth keeping.
Your subscriptions are yours; take them to any reader. Upload that reader's export and anything you already follow there is dropped here — and stays dropped, rather than reappearing the next time you save from that site.
Off by default. On at three levels, one item at a time.
Private, published at an address of its own, or listed publicly as well. Every item says in words which surfaces carry it, with a link to each.
Choose a handle and your published notes, photos and highlights get a blog at an address you can give people — with your comments on the things you saved.
RSS and JSON, for the public stream and for your blog separately, so nobody has to subscribe to the wrong thing.
Your blog is a fediverse actor: someone can follow it from Mastodon and your posts are delivered to them. Replies and likes are deliberately not accepted.
Sites you link to are told about it, where they can receive one — most of the web cannot, so this lands rarely. Mentions of your pages are collected for you to look at — shown only once you approve them.
Decisions, not a settings page.
How often each front-page link is followed, and nothing beside it — no address, no cookie, no identifier, nothing that can tell one reader from another. Deleted after ninety days. No advertising, and no third-party tracker anywhere.
A capture is of the page as you saw it, signed in and past the paywall, and is never served to anyone else. Only a publisher's own image is.
A video's cover and an episode's artwork are both our copy, on our own disk. Opening a page with either on it tells nobody; pressing play is the moment that changes — YouTube for a video, and for an episode whichever host the show uses — and the page says so.
Change your mind and everything published goes private at once, and remembers your choices for when you turn it back on.
Leaving is a supported feature.
Your items as CSV, your writing as a folder of Markdown files, your searches, your feeds as OPML. No format anyone needs this app to read.
Deleted items sit in the trash for thirty days and can be restored, or purged for good on purpose rather than by accident.
Everything goes — items, files, tags, feeds and tokens.
Wondering how this sits beside the other things people use for the same job? There is an app comparison — including where each of them is the better answer.
People here also keep blogs — notes, photos, and what they had to say about the things they saved.