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
Six ways in, so nothing has to be retyped.
A browser extension for Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari
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.
Forward it by email
Your account can have a private address of its own. Forward a newsletter or a message to it and it arrives as a private note, kept as a page you can read here beside a picture of how it arrived. A PDF attached to it comes in as a document of its own. A second address files it on Today as a to-do, dated if the subject ends with one.
Save by hand, from any screen
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.
Bring your bookmarks with you
Import the bookmarks file any browser exports, an export from Pinboard, Reeder, Instapaper or Pocket, a Day One journal, or a Letterboxd or Goodreads export — zipped or not — or Safari's Reading List from a copy of its Bookmarks.plist, and it works out which it is rather than asking you. A bookmark you kept private in Pinboard stays private here, and a journal's entries arrive private, with their photos, and a film or book you reviewed or rated, or a book you finished, arrives private, with your stars and your review. MyMind comes across through its own API with a key you give it, screenshots and notes included, and a later sync picks up what is new.
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.
Ask an assistant about what you saved
Connect Claude or another assistant that speaks the Model Context Protocol and ask it what you saved — it reads your library, private items included, and can change nothing.
Read it in your news reader
The feeds you follow sync to NetNewsWire, Reeder and other apps that speak the Google Reader API; star an article there and it is saved here, privately, unless you had saved it already.
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.
What it says, in a paragraph
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.
Read it here, in the copy you kept
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.
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.
A PDF is read too
Its text is pulled out, so it can be searched and read here like an article, and its first page becomes its picture. A document stays private: it can come from somebody else's attachment, so it is never published.
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.
Podcasts keep their episode
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.
Listen to it instead
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.
Send it to your Kindle
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.
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. The dead ones are gathered on a list of their own, where a few ticks move them to the trash.
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.
Search by meaning
Ask your library a question — it finds what you meant, not just the words you typed. Ask your library a question, and it can write a short answer from the five items that best match, with links to each.
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.
Where it came from, and when
Every site you save from is a board of its own. A timeline picks out the tags that ran hot for a stretch — a project, a trip, a season of one subject — measured against how much you were saving at the time, with the interests you never stop saving below them.
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.
Keys, not clicks
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.
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 — 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. Write - [ ] in a note and you get a checklist you can tick on the item's page.
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.
A vocabulary that stays a size you can read
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.
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 feeds you follow and 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. At the top, a few paragraphs on what your feeds published in the past day, written from their headlines and summaries and saying so. The briefing, the five Ws and the ranking use your own Anthropic key: they come with the Own key plan, not with Hosted.
Steer what it looks for
Add a topic it has not noticed, or drop one you are done with.
Five facts a story
Tick a feed and each story it published that day is set out under the briefing as who, what, when, where and why — for the feeds you want to keep up with rather than read.
The things you stopped opening
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. Pin anything you mean to get to and it waits on a list of its own for thirty days, longer if you ask.
Things you mean to do
Press Do this on anything you saved — the article, the product, the recipe — and it goes on a Today list, with everything you kept about it. Mark it done when you have; it moves to a Done list, and Undo puts it back. Give one a date and it sorts to the top when it falls due; switch on the morning email and you will hear about it at seven. Or type it straight onto Today — “pay the invoice friday” — and it is added with its date.
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.
OPML, in both directions
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.
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.
Write now, publish later
A private note is a draft. Schedule it — or a photo, or a saved link — for a minute of your choosing and it appears on your blog then, with notes and photos sent to your followers as they would be by hand. Pin one post to the top of your blog, and give the blog an about page that Mastodon shows on your profile. Readers can get your posts by email, as one digest each morning — you switch it on, and see how many subscribe, never who.
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. Connect Bluesky and each new post goes there too, and comes down if you take it off the blog.
Webmentions, sent and received
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.
Privacy, as a design decision
Decisions, not a settings page.
The only thing counted is a link
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.
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 plays until you ask it to
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.
Three ways to sign in
A passkey, an email address and password, or Sign in with Apple — Apple learns that you signed in and nothing about what you keep. Anyone can create an account with an email address; it opens when it subscribes.
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.
Hand it on
Every item carries a Share block: open it in Bluesky's or Mastodon's own composer, post it to micro.blog or an Are.na channel, or send the link to your own Pinboard, Raindrop, Readwise Reader, Karakeep or MyMind account in one press. The link and its title go, never your copy of the page — where you can share to.
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.
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.