I wasn’t one of the people viscerally affected by Google’s announcement of the forthcoming shutdown of Google Reader, since so far I’ve relied on a combination of standalone RSS clients and antediluvian hit-the-refresh-button-repeatedly habits. I am dinosaur: hear me roar!
However, the announcement prompted me to take another look at RSS readers. Nowadays, I rotate among my PC, phone, tablet, and laptop frequently, so going back to a purely standalone reader like NetNewsWire wasn’t appealing. The online services like NewsBlur would fit my needs better than a standalone reader (and I’m willing, even happy, to pay for the hope of longevity), but suffer from two disadvantages. They’re not open source, and as a consequence, it’s hard to dig through their guts. And I like digging!
I first found out about Tiny Tiny RSS from one of Ed Corrado’s tweets, and like a lot of people, visited the website and saw… a whole lotta nothing at first. Google really ought to give their open source competitors a little more warning of service cancellation announcements so that they can beef up their web hosting in advance!
Fortunately, I persevered and installed it. Tiny Tiny RSS, which is primarily written and maintained by Andrew Dolgov, is a web-based feed reader that you can install on your web server. It’s licensed under version 2 of the GPL. Installation is very simple if you have a VPS, and looks fairly easy to install on shared hosting as long as it provides MySQL or PostgreSQL databases. Once you have it running, you can easy import an OPML file or manually subscribe to feeds. The web interface for reading and managing feeds is clean and responsive. It also has an API and there are at least two Android clients. I couldn’t find an iOS client, but I suspect that somebody will scratch that itch soon.
So far, I’m quite happy with it. Thanks, Ed! Thanks, Andrew and all of the the other contributors!
Thanks for the tip by Galen Charlton is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
I’m glad that I was of some help and that you like Tiny Tiny RSS. I have yet to install it but plan on doing so at some point and it is good to know that so far, you are pleased with it.
FWIW, I tried another one, selfoss. Doesn’t seem bad, though perhaps coincidentally my server did lock up tight while playing with it. 🙂
Hopefully that was indeed just a coincidence. 🙂
Anyway, selfoss does look like a good option as well. After looking at the selfoss’ website, it occurred to me to check tt-rss’ mobile browser mode. It’s passable, although it appears to usable only for reading feeds.
After playing with them both, tt-rss won out for me, mostly because it has a debian package (in testing and unstable), and a plugin for Google Reader-style keymap. Still not sure how to reverse sort by date, though. 🙁
I did some poking around, and it looks like hitting ‘f’, then ‘x’ will resort a list of articles in reverse date order.
huzzah!