Bookmark Manager with a Built-in RSS Reader

Most bookmark managers stop at the link. You save a page, it lands in a folder, and if that site publishes something new next week you find out by accident. A feed reader answers the other half of the question, but it normally lives in a second application with a second login and its own list of sources. Bookmax keeps both in the same account: the panel on the left holds your bookmark folders, and one module further down holds the feeds you subscribe to.

That is the whole idea behind this page. Not a better reader than the dedicated ones, but the reader and the bookmarks in one place, because in practice they cover the same handful of websites.

Feeds are organized like folders

Subscriptions sit in groups, the same way bookmarks sit in folders. You create a group, paste the address of a feed into it, and the articles show up. Groups can be nested, renamed and reordered by dragging, so the structure you already use for your bookmark folders works here as well. Nothing new to learn: if you can file a bookmark, you can file a feed.

RSS and Atom, plus OPML in and out

Both feed formats are supported. Most sites that publish a feed announce it at an address ending in /feed or /rss, and that address is all Bookmax needs. Parsing is done with SimplePie, a library that has been maintained for about as long as Bookmax has existed and that copes with the many small ways a feed can be malformed.

Your subscription list is not locked in. Bookmax reads and writes OPML, the exchange format every feed reader understands. You can bring a list over from another reader in one file, and you can take it away again the same way. The same principle applies to the rest of your account, where bookmarks go in and out as a standard bookmarks file.

Three ways to read

The article stream merges everything from the selected group, newest first, and loads further articles as you scroll. Three views decide how much of each article you see: headlines only, for scanning a long list quickly; a compact list with a line of text under each title; and a tile view with the images the feed provides. On a phone the tile view is the only one, because the three small switches in the header are not usable at that width.

What this reader does not do

Articles are not stored in your account. They are fetched from the feeds and held in a cache, which means you see what a feed currently offers, not an archive. When a publisher drops an item from its feed, it disappears from Bookmax too. Every page of the stream reads all subscribed feeds and merges them, so a very long subscription list is noticeably slower than in a reader that keeps every article in its own database.

If reading feeds is the main thing you do all day, and you want full text search across years of articles, tagging rules and offline sync, a dedicated reader will serve you better. Bookmax is built for the person who follows twenty or thirty sites, wants to see what is new, and wants that in the same tab as the links, lists and contacts they already keep here.

What it costs

A free account can subscribe to ten feeds. A Premium account has no limit on the number of feeds and also unlocks the import and export functions of the other modules. The complete list of limits stands on the account comparison, the subscription terms on the pricing page. There is no advertising in either account, and no third party analytics on this site or in the application, which is described in more detail on the page about European data protection.

Trying it without registering

Both account types can be tried without giving an email address. Go to the login page and sign in as premium with the password premium to see the feed reader with its limits removed, or as demo with demo for the free version. When you want your own account, registration takes an email address and nothing else: create an account, add a feed, and the reader is there. An overview of the other modules is on the features page, and the background of a service that has been running since 2003 is on this page.