Google Reader is quitting on us and there doesn’t seem to be an alternative if you don’t want something that tries to make your feeds look all fancy and shiny eye-candy-ish like Feedly or most of the alternatives I saw.
The things I loved in Google Reader are:
1. Accessible from anywhere (which means web-based basically), so desktop based RSS readers didn’t cut it.
2. I can use it from my Android phone, either with an app or straight from the website.
3. I can skim feeds quickly and star or tag articles I want to read later.
4. The read-later articles need to be imported into Instapaper, using something like IFTT.
I started looking at some open source solutions because I didn’t want to end up getting shut down again. In the least the services needed to allow me to import & export feeds easily in case it does bail out.
I noticed a few open source applications running on PHP that are interesting but only one of them is still actively developed and has a decent user base. So Tiny Tiny RSS is what I ended up testing out.
It’s pretty close to Google Reader (which makes sense because it’s an RSS aggregator and reader after all) but it isn’t pretending to become it, or implement every GR features. It’s sailing its own course, but since it’s pretty damn close I thought I’d give it a shot.
So here comes the geeky bit:
Since this is a web app and not a web service, you have to host it yourself.
So this means getting the code, uploading it to your server, setting up the database and configuring it.
If that didn’t scare you off, all of this is nicely explained in this lifehacker post and on the TT-RSS installation notes. So you’re pretty safe there. Recently the software was updated to enable it to run on a shared hosting server, so you can basically run it anywhere from now on.
If I wouldn’t have my own hosting I’d try to get it running on a NearlyFreeSpeech site to try it out for cheaps. You can set up a PHP site quick and cheap over there if you have the know-how.
There’s and Android application on the market you can try for 7 days for free to connect to your instance of Tiny Tiny RSS (after you open up the API settings in the configuration) and it works great. It costs only a few bucks so I figured I was willing to pay that to the author of this fine piece of work that’s available to the world for free after all.
It also supports starring and tagging posts, and it allows you to expose your starred items as an RSS feed so you can pull that into IFTT for syncing with Instapaper.
There you have it. All requirements are met with free software (except the Android app bit) and a bit of geeky work on your part to get things set up and running. So far things are running great and I didn’t run into any issues yet.
You can set this up for multiple users, so if you have friends that are also orphaned by Google Reader you can share your instance with them.
Photo by stylianosm, cc-licensed.