LynxJournal is a WordPress plugin for managing and publishing curated link digests. Save interesting links, organise them by category, and publish them as blog post digests.

Features:

Save links with title, URL, description, categories, and tags
Organise links by category (inspired by frankysnotes.com)
REST API for integration with browser extensions (Chrome/Firefox)
Schedule automatic digest publishing (daily, weekly, monthly, or by count/age)
Notify Email, Discord, Slack, Telegram, or Mastodon when a digest is published, with admin alerts on delivery failures
Customise the layout of roundup posts with a Post Template editor
Chrome extension support

Usage

Dashboard

The LynxJournal dashboard (LynxJournal › Dashboard) gives you an at-a-glance overview:

Stats bar — total links, categories, published, and unpublished counts
Quick Add — enter a title, URL, and category to save a link in seconds without leaving the dashboard
Recent Unpublished — the last five unpublished links; delete any of them directly from this list
Recently Published — the last five published roundup posts with their status

Adding Links

Manually (full form): Go to LynxJournal › Add Link. Fill in:

Title (required)
URL
Description
Categories — assign to one or more existing categories
Tags — comma-separated keywords

Quick add: Use the Quick Add box on the Dashboard for a fast title + URL + category entry.

Via Chrome extension: Browse to any page and click the extension icon. The title and URL are pre-filled; add a description, pick a category, and click Save Link.

Managing Links

LynxJournal › All Links shows your saved links in a paginated table, grouped by category. Use the search box, or filter by date or category, to narrow the list.

Status badges — Unpublished, Draft, or Published
View — open the published post or draft (published/draft links only)
Unpublish — revert a published or draft link back to unpublished (published/draft links only)
Edit — open the link in the standard WordPress post editor
Delete — removes the link permanently (confirmation required)

Publishing

Click Publish on the Dashboard. All unpublished links are bundled into one post, grouped by category. Enter a custom title or leave the default (“Links Roundup – [date]”). Choose to publish immediately or save as draft, using the Draft toggle before confirming.

Post Template

By default, roundup posts use a fixed look: a heading for each category followed by a bulleted list of that category’s links. If you’d like a different layout, LynxJournal › Post Template lets you design your own.

How it works: You write your layout as plain text. Special placeholders written in square brackets — such as [title], [link], or [category_name] — get swapped for the real post, link, and category information whenever a roundup post is published. A live preview below the editor shows exactly what your layout will look like as you type — nothing is ever saved or published from the preview. Use the Theme/Default switch to see it styled with your site’s active theme or with a plain generic look, and the Desktop/Mobile switch to check both widths. (Theme styling only applies to the post content itself — it doesn’t show your site’s header, footer, or sidebar.)

Formatting toolbar: Above the editor is a simple toolbar — Undo, Redo, Bold, Italic, Underline, headings, bullet and numbered lists, indent, outdent, and a horizontal rule — much like a basic word processor. Clicking a button inserts the matching formatting at your cursor.

Available tokens: Click Available tokens to open a reference panel listing every placeholder you can use, grouped by what it represents (post details, links, categories, tags). Click any one to insert it at the cursor.

Saving: Click Save Template to keep your changes. A confirmation message appears once it’s saved.

This feature is entirely optional — if you don’t set up a template, LynxJournal simply keeps using its original built-in layout.

Note: extra blank lines in your template are collapsed to a single blank line in the actual published post. The small ¶ marks you see while editing are just to help you see spacing while you type — they don’t represent the final spacing exactly.

Scheduling

LynxJournal › Schedule lets automatic roundup publishing run without manual action. Open LynxJournal › Schedule, choose a mode, set at least one Execution Time, and click Save Schedule. The next time that moment arrives, LynxJournal publishes a roundup post from all unpublished links. To trigger a run immediately, use the Run Now button on the dashboard. To stop all automation, switch to Manual mode.

Modes

Daily — Publishes at a fixed time every day, provided at least one unpublished link exists.
Weekly — Publishes on specific days of the week. Toggle any combination of Mon–Sun. At least one day must be selected.
Monthly — Publishes on dates you define, every month. Each “day entry” is either a fixed calendar day (1–31) or an ordinal weekday (“the first Monday”). Multiple entries produce multiple runs per month. If a month is shorter than the configured day (e.g. 31st in a 30-day month), that entry is skipped for that month.
By Count — Publishes when the number of unpublished links reaches or exceeds a threshold. The check runs at every configured execution time.
By Age — Publishes when the oldest unpublished link is older than N days. The check runs at every configured execution time.
Manual — Disables all automatic publishing. Use Run Now or the dashboard Publish form to publish on demand.

Execution Times

Applies to all modes except Manual. Specify one or more 24-hour times (HH:MM) at which the scheduler wakes up. Click + Add time to add a row; click ✕ to remove one. At least one time must remain. Duplicate values are silently removed on save. Adding multiple times means the scheduler can publish more than once per day.

Previewing upcoming runs

In Daily, Weekly, and Monthly modes the Next 10 Schedules sidebar panel lists the next ten wake-up dates based on your current (unsaved) settings. Use it to verify your recurrence pattern before saving.

Saving the schedule

Click Save Schedule at the bottom of the settings column. On save, any previously pending cron event is cancelled and a new one is scheduled for the next matching time.

Running the schedule immediately

The Run Now button on the LynxJournal dashboard triggers an immediate publish run. It respects the same publish condition as the automatic schedule. In every mode, the run is silently skipped when there are no unpublished links — no empty roundup is ever created. The automatic schedule is unaffected.

What a roundup post looks like

Each run creates one WordPress post titled Links: [Full Date] (e.g. Links: April 28, 2026), published immediately as a standard post by default — or saved as a draft instead if you set Post Status to Draft on the Schedule page. The body contains one section per category, each with a list of links. Each link shows its title (linked to the saved URL, opening in a new tab) and, optionally, a description below it. Uncategorised links appear in their own section at the end. Every included link is marked accordingly (published, or draft if Post Status is set to Draft) and excluded from future digests either way.

Edge cases and caveats

WP-Cron timing — WordPress’s built-in cron fires when a visitor loads a page. On low-traffic sites, the actual run may be a few minutes late. For precise timing, set up a real system cron job (see Server-side cron setup below).
Timezone and DST — Execution times use your WordPress site timezone (Settings › General › Timezone). On daylight-saving transitions, spring-forward runs may be delayed by ~1 hour; fall-back runs fire once at the first occurrence of the repeated local time.
Backfill after downtime — Missed events are not backfilled. As soon as WordPress runs again, a single catch-up run executes and the next slot is computed from the current time. Use Run Now to force a catch-up immediately.
Deactivating the plugin — Deactivation automatically cancels any pending cron event. No event is re-registered until you save the schedule again after reactivation.
Uninstalling the plugin — Deleting the plugin (not just deactivating it) permanently removes everything: all saved links, categories, and tags, all plugin options (including the schedule), all transients, and the pending cron event. No manual cleanup is needed.

Server-side cron setup

WP-Cron only fires when a visitor hits the site. For reliable scheduling:

Disable WP-Cron in wp-config.php: define( 'DISABLE_WP_CRON', true );
Add a system cron entry that runs every minute:
- - - - curl -sS https://example.com/wp-cron.php?doing_wp_cron > /dev/null 2>&1
Or with WP-CLI: * * * * * cd /path/to/wordpress && wp cron event run --due-now > /dev/null 2>&1

WP-CLI usage

LynxJournal does not register custom WP-CLI commands, but the standard cron commands work:

wp cron event list | grep lynxjournal — list pending LynxJournal cron events
wp cron event run lynxjournal_execute_schedule — force an immediate run (equivalent to Run Now)
wp option get lynxjournal_schedule --format=json — inspect the saved schedule
wp option delete lynxjournal_schedule — delete the schedule configuration

Logging and observability

The scheduler does not write to a custom log. To verify a run happened, check: Posts › All Posts (a new “Links: …” post appears on each successful run); the WP Crontrol plugin; or wp cron event list for the next-scheduled timestamp. The Next 10 Schedules panel on the Schedule page shows upcoming times for time-based modes.

Capabilities

Viewing the Schedule page, saving the schedule, and triggering Run Now all require the manage_options capability (administrator role by default). To delegate to other roles, grant the capability using a tool such as the User Role Editor plugin or add_cap() in your own code.

Chrome Extension

install the Chrome Extension “LynxJournal” from https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/link-digest/majjnembpebmpoaeoildijhhgbjfgjmn
In WordPress, go to LynxJournal › Browser Extension, generate an API key, and copy the API Endpoint URL and key
Click the extension icon › Settings, paste both values, and save
From now on, click the extension icon on any page to save the current URL directly to your WordPress site

Source Code & Build Tools

The production JavaScript assets in schedule/schedule.js are compiled from React components.
The unminified source code, build scripts, and configuration files are publicly maintained at:
https://github.com/Latz/lynxjournal