The Boring Reader: how I built my own read-later app

Hey everyone, this is Allan. Yesterday I committed to reading 30 pages a day, and I mentioned that I built a website to gather all the articles I want to read. This video is just a quick walk‑through of how it works. I’m not going to get technical; I’m sharing the project I built for myself. It started as a personal solution, not a money‑making venture, although I might open it up in the future and let you use it because it’s helped me organize my reading.

The Problem

I consume a lot of text, Twitter threads, Medium posts, newsletters, PDFs, and emails. Often the content is long and I’m not disciplined enough to finish it in one sitting. When I come back, I forget where I stopped. EPUB files solve that for me because they remember the last position, so I wanted a way to turn any text into something like an EPUB.

My Sources

I’m subscribed to newsletters from people like Cal Newport, Justin Welsh, Dan Cole, and Naval Ravikant. My inbox used to be full of content I didn’t start because I knew I wouldn’t finish it, and I also had a “favorites” folder in my browser that I rarely checked. This tool lets me consolidate everything in one place and actually read it.

Simple Design

I call the project “Boring Reader” because I wanted something simple, straight to the point, with only the features I need. I’m not adding endless features; I’m just fixing bugs and making small improvements. The interface has three main sections: Library, Statistics, and Settings (the only setting I need is appearance), plus a sign‑out option.

Tracking Progress

The Statistics page shows my daily goal of 30 pages, which I estimate as 300 words per page. I also treat roughly 80,000 words as a book. There’s a heat‑map activity view, similar to GitHub, that shows which days I met my goal. I can see the list of books I’ve finished, the dates, word counts, and authors. I started using this in March, so it’s been a little over two months and it’s already useful.

The Library

My library now holds about 200 items, most of them emails that were cluttering my inbox. Some are fully read, others are partially read. When an item contains a lot of marketing copy, I mark it as read at the point where the substantive content ends, so only the meaningful words count toward my goal.

Adding Content

You can add content in several ways:

• Paste a title, author, and the text directly.
• Upload a PDF or an EPUB file.
• Provide a URL and click “Extract.” The tool pulls the title and author when possible (sometimes the author is missing or the title isn’t perfect).

For example, I copied a Naval article URL, extracted it, and it appeared in the library as a 500‑word entry. Clicking “Read” opens the text in a clean, EPUB‑like view. From there I can:

• Copy the whole text to my second brain.
• Download the content as Markdown or EPUB.
• Edit the metadata or delete the entry.
• Mark the article as read, which counts only the words I actually read.

There’s a minor bug where word counts can be off, but that’s easy to fix later.

Getting Access

If you want to try it, the link is in the description, but sign‑up isn’t public yet. Email me (address in the description) and I’ll grant you access.

Final Thought

A boring system that I actually use beats a perfect system that sits idle. I prefer something simple that lets me read and hit my goal, rather than a complex setup that gets in the way. That’s it for today.