Basic usage#

Kustosz user interface follows familiar pattern used by many other news reading applications: navigation pane on the left and central list of items on the right. Article below is not exhaustive and focuses primarily on features that are specific to Kustosz or might be hard to discover. Two prominent features are documented on separate pages: Searching and Filters.

Adding new channel#

Channel is source of content displayed in Kustosz. Currently RSS, Atom and JSON Feed are supported.

To add a new channel, click “Add content” button on top of navigation pane. In window that appears, paste URL of website you would like to subscribe to. Kustosz will automatically detect channels provided by the website. Click on channel name to get preview of few latest entries. Click “Add channel” to subscribe to channel.

Alternatively, you can click down arrow right to “Add content” and click “Add channel”. In window that appears, you need to provide full URL of XML file. You can also specify channel title and tags.

Keyboard navigation#

You can use your keyboard to quickly move through articles:

  • j - move to next article and open it

  • k - move to previous article and open it

  • n - move to next article without opening it (currently opened article will remain open)

  • b, p - move to previous article without opening it (currently opened article will remain open)

  • o, Space, Enter - open currently selected article, or close if it’s already opened

  • m - mark currently selected article as read, or mark it back as unread

Adding web page manually#

You can add any web page to Kustosz. This is especially useful for older articles that no longer appear in website feed, for articles published by websites that don’t publish feed, or when you don’t want to subscribe to feed.

From Kustosz#

Click “Add content” button on top of navigation pane. In window that appears, paste URL of entry you would like to add. Kustosz will also detect channels provided by website, if any. Click “Add article” to add specified web page.

Alternatively, you can click down arrow right to “Add content” and click “Add article”. In window that appears, you need to provide URL of article. You can also specify tags.

From web browser#

Bookmarklets are special bookmarks that execute JavaScript in the context of currently opened page. They are supported by all major web browsers.

Kustosz automatically creates ready to use bookmarklet for you. Click “Settings” at the bottom of navigation panel and scroll down to “Add to Kustosz” link. Copy link target and paste it in “URL” field of a new bookmark; or drag-and-drop the link to bookmarks bar (be wary that many browsers hide bookmarks bar by default).

Whenever you open a page you would like to add to Kustosz, click a bookmark you have added. Instead of opening bookmarked page, browser will send HTTP request to Kustosz, and Kustosz will add visited page.

On mobile device, you need to tap on address bar and start typing your bookmark name. Opening bookmark from separate Bookmarks screen will not work.

From iOS device#

This method requires token. See How to obtain the token? below.

iOS comes with “Shortcuts” app. You can use it to automate certain tasks on your mobile device.

Open “Add to Kustosz” shortcut page on your iPhone or iPad and confirm that you want to open Shortcuts app. App will guide you through adding new shortcut, including setting up Kustosz instance address and token.

After shortcut has been added, there will be “Add to Kustosz” action available in website sharing menu.

From terminal#

This method requires token. See How to obtain the token? below.

You can use curl, which should be available on most Linux machines, to send HTTP request from your terminal:

curl -X POST 'http://KUSTOSZ_URL/api/v1/entries/manual_add' \
    -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
    -H 'Authorization: Token KUSTOSZ_TOKEN' \
    -d '{"link": "http://URL_OF_WEB_PAGE"}'

From the machine where Kustosz is installed#

This method doesn’t require any setup, but can only be exercised on a machine where Kustosz is installed:

kustosz-manager add_entry --link 'http://URL_OF_WEB_PAGE'

Exporting channels to OPML file#

You can export Kustosz channels to OPML file, making it easy to migrate away from Kustosz to another feed reader.

Click “Settings” at the bottom of navigation panel and scroll down to “Export data” section. Then, click “Export channels as OPML” button.

Alternatively, use following command on a machine where Kustosz is installed:

kustosz-manager export_channels --file /path/to/file.xml

Automatic channels update frequency#

When editing a channel, you can set automatic update frequency - how often Kustosz should check for new content. Default value is every one hour. If channel is lower priority for you or is known to publish seldom, you can check it less often. If you want to ensure that you learn about new content quickly enough and channel publishes a lot of content, you can check it more frequently.

Every time you check for new content, website server uses a little bit of resources. Some websites might be behind firewall or CDN that will detect too frequent connections and block them, thinking this might be some sort of attack. That’s why you should not check for new content too often. Every 30 minutes is reasonable lower limit.

Kustosz relies on external scheduler to start channels update procedure - you might have set it up during installation, depending on your deployment environment. We recommend that channels update process is run every 5 minutes. This value puts effective limit on channels update frequency. If you have set up external scheduler to check for updates every hour, and set update frequency of specific channel to 5 minutes, that channel will still be updated every hour.

Using local file as channel source#

Kustosz can read content from any XML file that follows RSS or Atom specification. While most of these files are delivered through web, you can use local file as well. This way Kustosz can read any content source it does not handle natively - as long as you can transform it into RSS or Atom file.

First, save XML files inside the $KUSTOSZ_BASE_DIR/feeds directory. You can create directories inside to organize your files. Then, run following command:

kustosz-manager import_channels --wait autodiscover

If you add new files in the future, just re-run the command.

Deactivating a channel#

When modifying a channel, you can toggle “active” flag. When “active” flag is disabled (channel is not active), it will not be checked for new content during channels update.

Deactivating a channel is intermediate step before removing it. Channel is not checked for new content, but all past content is still available in the application. This is especially useful for channels that disappeared from the web, stopped being updated or are very active and you want to silent them for a while.

Deduplication#

Deduplication automatically marks some entries as read, so they don’t appear on the default list of entries when opening the application.

Deduplication is turned on by default. You can opt-out specific channels by turning off “is deduplicated” flag. When flag is disabled, entries from that channel are never marked as read by deduplication algorithm. You can also turn off deduplication altogether by setting KUSTOSZ_DEDUPLICATE_DAYS setting to 0.

Deduplication works only across channels, i.e. entries from one channel are never considered a duplicates. That’s because some authors use the same title for all of their posts.

Deduplication algorithm looks into entry GID, normalized link and author-title pair. If any of these values is the same as for one of other entries, latter entry is considered a duplicate. By default, deduplication algorithm looks into all entries added in last 2 days.

Maintenance section#

Maintenance section provides views to quickly (de)activate multiple channels at once.

Stale channels#

Channels become stale when Kustosz determines it’s no longer possible to access them.

In general, it’s normal for resources to become temporarily unavailable - websites are upgraded to new versions, are unable to cope with amount of traffic after going viral on social media, people forget to pay hosting bills. That’s why Kustosz will mark channels as stale only if they could not be accessed for extended period of time: during last 10 tries (determined by update frequency) or in last three days, whichever is longer.

It’s worth noting that stale channels might have been moved to new URL without leaving proper redirection in place. It’s up to you as an user to determine if that is the case.

Channels without new entries#

These channels are online and can be accessed, but have not produced a new entry in number of days (30 by default).

Inactive channels#

These channels have “active” flag turned off. You can activate them back or delete them.

Deleting channel automatically deletes all channel entries. However, if any entry is tagged, Kustosz will ask if you want to delete tagged entries or keep them. If you decide to keep them, they will be moved from deleted channel to special “Manually added” channel with id 1.

How to obtain the token?#

Authorization token is like password - it allows Kustosz to decide if incoming HTTP request should be allowed to perform an action. You should not share authorization token with other people.

Token is included in all requests that Kustosz UI sends to server. You can open web browser development tools (F12), click Network tab and select any request of XHR type. In Request Headers section, there will be Authorization header with value Token 0123456789abcdef0123456789abcdef01234567. This long string of random letters and numbers is a token.

Another way is running following command:

kustosz-manager drf_create_token KUSTOSZ_USER