Features and benefits

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.

Getting things in

Five ways in, so nothing has to be retyped.

A browser extension for Safari and Chrome

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.

A Shortcut in the iPhone share sheet

Save from Safari, Mail, Messages or any other app on the phone, without an app to install or another account to sign into.

Save by hand, from any screen

A dialog on every page of the app takes a link, a note or a highlight, with its tags, without leaving what you were doing.

Bring your bookmarks with you

Import the bookmarks file any browser exports, and import from MyMind — including a live sync that keeps picking up new ones.

An API, and Micropub

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.

What happens after you save

You do nothing. It reads, tags and keeps.

The page is read and kept

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.

Tags you never write

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.

Text pulled out of pictures

A screenshot or a photograph of a page has its words read out of it, so an image is as findable as an article.

Music gets its video

Save a song and the recording is found and shown with it, behind a cover you press to play.

Broken links are noticed

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.

Finding it again

Half a remembered phrase is enough.

Search that finds it

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.

Searches you keep

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.

Tags as a way around

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.

Two ways to look

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.

Your own words

The part of a collection that is actually yours.

Notes and highlights

Keep a note of your own, or pull a passage off a page. Both are searchable and taggable like everything else, and both stay private unless you choose otherwise.

A note on anything

Say what you thought about a saved page, in Markdown, alongside it rather than in another app.

Pictures and photos

Give an item the picture it should be shown with, and give a note a gallery of its own — up to twelve.

A video on anything

Attach a YouTube video to any item. It plays behind a cover, so nothing loads from Google until you press it.

Tags you can steer

The vocabulary is yours; the machine works to it.

Yours outrank the machine's

A tag you add by hand is kept when the item is read again, and one you remove is not put back.

Suggestions you approve

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.

Merge, rename, delete

Two spellings of one idea become one. Every destructive action shows you what it will do before it does it.

Something to read

Reading that comes to you, without a river.

A paper every morning

A daily reading list drawn from the topics you actually save, gathered from several sources and ranked, replaced each day so nothing piles up.

Steer what it looks for

Add a topic it has not noticed, or drop one you are done with.

Follow the sites you keep saving from

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.

Export the list as OPML

Your subscriptions are yours; take them to any reader.

Publishing, if you want it

Off by default. On at three levels, one item at a time.

Three rungs, not a switch

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.

A blog of your own

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.

Feeds, for both

RSS and JSON, for the public stream and for your blog separately, so nobody has to subscribe to the wrong thing.

Followable from Mastodon

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.

Webmentions, sent and received

Sites you link to are told about it, and mentions of your pages are collected for you to look at — shown only once you approve them.

Privacy, as a design decision

Decisions, not a settings page.

No analytics, no trackers, no advertising

None. Not a lighter set than usual — none at all.

Your screenshots are never public

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.

Nothing loads from Google until you ask

A video's cover is our copy on our own disk. Opening a page with a video on it tells YouTube nothing; pressing play is the moment that changes, and the page says so.

One switch turns it all off

Change your mind and everything published goes private at once, and remembers your choices for when you turn it back on.

Nothing locked in

Leaving is a supported feature.

Export everything

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.

A trash that waits

Deleted items sit in the trash for thirty days and can be restored, or purged for good on purpose rather than by accident.

Delete the account, and mean it

Everything goes — items, files, tags, feeds and tokens.

People here also keep blogs — notes, photos, and what they had to say about the things they saved.