Switching from Google Reader to Tiny Tiny RSS

Given the concerns about the enormous amount of data Google continuously collects about its users and because of the fact that their CEO seems to have a poor understanding of privacy (Schmidt stated “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place”) and despite Google’s Jonathan Rosenberg recent manifesto on openness I decided to move some of my online activities away from the all-seeing eye of  Google. After switching to scroogle.org for normal search, I now found an alternative for Google Reader as well in Tiny Tiny RSS.
Tiny Tiny RSS (or “tt-rss” for short) is an open source web application written in PHP with a PostgreSQL or MySQL database. The webapp is AJAX-based, multi-user and is offline-enabled using Google Gears (you can check out a demo here). There’s also a mobile version, a (deprecated) XML-RPC API and a brand new experimental JSON-API, which I’m playing around with, using XUI to write a minimal mobile version of my own.
For those who are not able to install and configure tt-rss or who don’t want to burden their server with it, developer Andrew Dolgov put up a hosted version (thanks Andrew!) where currently 8 more users can register.
After having switched about a week ago, I find I barely miss Google Reader, although tt-rss still feels a little rough around the edges at times. The only real limitation is that shared items (‘published’ in tt-rss) off course aren’t automagically shared with your Google friends. I now automatically import my tt-rss published articles and manually share those every few days in Reader. Because I wouldn’t want to disappoint my Google friends, now would I?

6 thoughts on “Switching from Google Reader to Tiny Tiny RSS”

  1. Any news on your “minimal mobile version”? I read your posts in the tt-rss forum, and would be quite interested in seeing the results of your work.

    Reply
    • hi dom; there is “something”, but I had to put this on hold for now due to a lack of time, so it’s far from finished. you can check it out on http://futtta.be/tttouch-rss/. you’ll first be presented with a small form in which you’ll have to enter an online.tt-rss.org username and password and leave the 3rd field as is.
      some “known issues”;
      no “mark all as read” for example
      some problems with onclick eventlisteners behaving badly (i think)
      only works with http://online.tt-rss.org/, not local tt-rss installations
      feel free to provide feedback!

      Reply
  2. Hi,
    Thanks for the quick reply; I’m afraid I don’t have an account on online.tt-rss.org — I’m using a self-hosted tt-rss set up — so I couldn’t try your implementation.
    That said, I assume that all the code there is to see is the JavaScript code linked from the form, and I’ll try to have a look at it, time permitting. You don’t happen to have shared the code on a repository of some sort (e.g. github)?
    Thanks again,
    Dom

    Reply

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