User Guide
The feed
The main feed has several tabs (Newest, Relevant, Impact, Read Later, plus any custom tabs you define) and can be filtered by category, by source, to unread-only, or to uncategorized-only. Each card shows:
A pill per source (one per outlet, for a clustered story — see Clustering) and a category pill
The LLM-generated title/summary, with an info icon showing which provider and model produced it (see LLM Providers)
👍/👎 to mark relevant/disliked (feeds Learning & Scoring), plus bookmark (read later) and share actions
Clicking a card’s title opens the original article on the source site — Shoebill only ever shows a summary and a link out (see Introduction).
Custom tabs let you save a specific combination of filters (a category, a source, a sort order) as a named, one-click tab — useful for “just my work-relevant categories” or “just this one source” views you switch to often.
Categories
Settings → Categories is where you define the topics Shoebill sorts articles into. Each category has a name, a color, optional keywords, and an optional custom prompt fragment giving the LLM extra context on what belongs in it. A built-in IPTC-based taxonomy of common categories is available as a starting point, and a “Default Categories” browser lets you pull in ones you want without hand-writing them all.
Sources
Settings → Sources — add, edit, deactivate, and manually trigger a fetch for any source. See Sources for every source type’s exact configuration. Sources can be exported/imported as JSON, and you can copy another user’s shared source configuration directly rather than re-entering it.
Learning
Settings → Learning shows every category’s learned weight, manual override, and effective weight, plus how many items you’ve starred in each — see Learning & Scoring for exactly how these numbers are computed. This is also where you mute (0×) or boost (2×) a category manually.
Preferences
Theme (light/dark), UI language, output language (if you want summaries translated regardless of source language), and the numeric tuning parameters behind scoring/decay/diversity (see Learning & Scoring) for anyone who wants to adjust the defaults.
API Tokens, also under Preferences, is where you generate a token for external tools — notably the MCP Server, which lets Claude or other MCP clients read and interact with your feed.
Notifications
Push notifications (Web Push — see Configuration for the VAPID setup this requires) can be scoped to a relevance threshold, specific categories, and/or a specific custom tab, so you’re only notified about the subset of your feed you actually want interrupted for.
Stats
A per-user activity view: items fetched/read/starred over time, and a breakdown of your reading activity by category.
Admin: Users
Admin accounts can create additional user accounts, reset passwords, and view aggregate usage stats across all users, under Settings → Users.