Because there is a huge amount of papers that I have to struggle through, I made things easy for myself. To test the water so to speak, I created an RSS feed bot on Bluesky. That’s going reasonably well; however, it works via Google Sheets, and I don’t want that, I prefer full control and selfhosted content. Because I have a Synology DS1621+ NAS running here with quite a few Terabytes of storage and 32 GB of RAM, I can go all out on it. So, I have an n8n instance running there that, with the help of Ollama, retrieves papers for me at its leisure and posts them on this website. Everything running within the confounds of my NAS, completely selfhosted.
The current setup is so that n8n checks several PubMed RSS feeds, checks if those papers have already been posted on my website, and then processes them so that they appear on my site in the correct format with a short extra summary, allowing me to go through those papers quickly. It took me a few days to build this, but now I can focus on finding the best search terms for the RSS feeds and I don’t have to worry about missing a paper.
Since I also use Zotero to organize the papers I actually want to use, the next step is to build a workflow in n8n that, once I approve a paper—which automatically ends up as a draft on my site—ensures it is immediately added to Zotero via the DOI. This way, I can comfortably read the paper summaries in a nice layout wherever I am, while the rest is automated and I don’t have to worry about it.
The n8n RSS feed workflow is already running very smoothly. I was briefly afraid that running Ollama on a NAS would be far too demanding, but it’s not bad at all, especially since it doesn’t have to perform very heavy calculations. Ollama mainly provides a short, readable summary and formats the article so that I don’t have to do anything more to the layout. And so: yes, I use AI, but basically in the way you would normally use a piece of code to connect things nicely. You will see the results on the website soon, but for now, I’m first making sure it looks good and is useable 😉
