Last updated on March 19, 2013
With Google announcing that Google Reader will be shut down on July 1, 2013 I finally got around to trying out Tiny Tiny RSS, a web-based, host-it-yourself, multi-user, database-backed RSS reader. I’ve always tried to keep an eye on alternatives to Google’s services, and for the last year or so I’ve considered giving this a go. The announced sunset finally made me give it a go.
This was pretty easy to set up, with the biggest hassle coming from trying to make the optional Sphinx search engine do its thing. The poller took a little bit of effort to get right as well, but running it in the background via daemon(8) seems to have done the needful. Getting my Google Reader feeds into was pretty easy as well. By visiting https://www.google.com/reader/subscriptions/export I received an XML file that I could import into Tiny Tiny RSS via the Preferences → Feeds → OPML menu. I received a rather odd error during the import, but after exiting from Preferences all of my feeds were listed. (One can get all of their Google Reader info via Takeout as detailed here on Google’s Data Liberation page.)
Beyond a growing number of desktop apps that support Tiny Tiny RSS as a back end (as opposed to Google Reader) there is also an official Tiny Tiny RSS Android app which, so far, seems nicer than Google’s mobile Reader offering. The app costs $1.99 after the initial 7-day trial, but I think this is a small price to pay to support the author for such a nicely working setup. The source for the app is available here if one really doesn’t want to pay, but for this I think supporting the author is a great idea.
I’m really looking forward to seeing how fast development on Tiny Tiny RSS will progress now that it is getting widespread attention as a Google Reader replacement. While it seems to work well the UI is a bit ugly, and when used from work via a proxy it seems a bit slow at times. I could see a whole bunch of UI changes and performance improvements coming if it gets attention from folks who specialize in this.
If any of you who read this and know me would like an account on nuxx.net so you may use it yourself as a replacement for Google Reader, drop me a note and I’ll set you up.
(And yes, this is a test post to see if it shows up in the reader, just to confirm that everything is working…)
I’m looking at deploying (and ultimately extending) this myself.
Yeah I’m going to install that too.
I’ve also got the Citadel groupware thing installed (but not configured yet) to mess with. If I can get it handling my mail and calendars, and then convince SquirrelMail to work I might have a nicely contained system that doesn’t rely on Google.
I might give DokuWiki a go for storing my personal notes that currently live in GoogleDocs. I did have a MediaWiki install once, but it’s too big and I can lose hours hacking it.
I have tt-rss working and it seems quite good. It’s on my server, all hidden behind some HTTP-AUTH and a bit of snake oil HTTPS. They even have a mobile version that works well on my iPad.
Do you know a way to make it cache the images in posts, and then serve them instead of just embedding a link to the images that posts might contain?
Work’s stupid proxy blocks XKCD and Dilbert you see, so I can’t get my daily fix. However it’s quite happy to let me see JWZ’s blog and all the slightly disturbing images he likes to post (his website being a great way to prove keyword filtering just doesn’t work ;-)
James: Sorry, I do not. I think that’d get way different because then it’d need to scrape and cache… Sounds like a lot more than just tt-rss is designed to do. I wonder if you could use Apache as a proxy and have tt-rss rewrite all the URLs for you to bounce things through your server?