Tiny Tiny RSS

Tiny Tiny RSS (free) is meant for the DIY crowd. It is not an RSS feed reader that you just import all your feeds from Google Reader and be up in a matter of minutes. Tiny Tiny RSS lets you build your own RSS reader and customize the platform your way. It can easily take a couple hours to get everything set up and to tweak the UI, but if you like a little control over your RSS destiny, you will be fine. For everyone else not used to looking at code, all this may sound a little intimidating, and we recommend using G2Reader?as our Editors' Choice for RSS jean- feed readers and in particular, a replacement to Google Reader. But using Tiny Tiny RSS to build your own feed reader is still possible with a little patience.

Tiny Tiny RSS is a Web application, so you need a Web server that supports PHP and either a MySQL or PostgreSQL database. Your desktop won't do. If you happen to have a Linux server lying around, you are set. Or you can use a Web host which supports PHP and lets you install a database, such as Dreamhost or even Amazon Web Services. You will also need a domain name so that you can type www.thisismysite.com?in your Web browser to load your very own Tiny Tiny RSS. If you already have a domain name, create a subdomain, such as myrss.thisismysite.com, and you are good to go.

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Before you can get started, you need to have PHP installed on your Web server and create the database. If you need help, you need to ask your Web host or Google because Tiny Tiny RSS assumes you know how to set up and manage a server. Once you are ready, you can grab the install archive (tarball, a .tar.gz file) from the Tiny Tiny RSS Wiki, which contains all the files you need to set up the application and the database schema. The wiki actually has a decent set of instructions for an open-source project, so you should be able to get up and running although some Googling may be required.

If you've set everything up correctly, at this point, you can point your browser to your domain and log in to your very own Tiny RSS instance. Adding new feeds is easy. Just click the Actions menu at the top right corner of the screen and select Subscribe to Feed. To remove a feed, select it on the sidebar and click on Unsubscribe in the Actions menu.

You need to go into Preferences from the Actions menu to?import the list of RSS links from Google Reader. Under the "Feed" tab on the Preferences page, there is a section marked "OPML." This is where you list the subscriptions.xml file that you exported using Google Takeout. Click on "Import my OPML," and don't worry about the fact that your file has a .xml file extension and not .opml. It will work fine.?

If you have a lot of subscriptions, though, this is gonna take a while. I had only 81 and I got bored waiting.

Slow is a recurrent theme in Tiny Tiny RSS. It took about 20 to 30 seconds to move between the main page and Preferences, and about 10 to 15 seconds whenever I clicked on something on the page, such as a tab or moving to a new folder. Part of it is because, by default, Tiny Tiny RSS updates and grabs new items when you actually click on the feed instead of doing it beforehand. But the application itself has some performance issues.

While I don't have hardware or networking equipment on par with Amazon's or Google's, mine probably? makes for a better setup than what most home users have (let's just say: a virtual machine with four CPUs at 1 GHz each and 4 GB of memory, running on a host with 32 virtual cores on a business-grade network) and it's quite capable of handling multiple Web applications. Tiny Tiny RSS is the first application to ever give me performance issues.

Even if the import returns errors, the odds are everything completed successfully. You should see all the subscriptions in the left sidebar, organized in the same way as Google Reader, folders and all. You can select the feed and click the Actions menu to see what you can do, such as edit, rename, color-code, or re-categorize. However, Tiny Tiny RSS won't automatically update the feeds. You can turn on Simple Update Mode in the configuration file to update the feeds while you are logged in, or set up an update process on the server to run the updates even when you are not on the site.?

There are some nice features, though, such as getting a daily digest of your subscriptions and all your unread stories emailed to you, scoring each feed so that "interesting" articles always float to the top of the list, or adding a note associated with the item. Since you control the code, you can use CSS to tweak the site layout and design and create users to let other people use the platform for their own RSS needs. Once installed, you can use any computer with a Web browser to access Tiny Tiny RSS. There is an Android app, but not one for iOS yet.

The current Editors' Choice G2Reader remains the only RSS feeder we've seen that can correctly import Google Alerts. If you miss the social sharing capabilities that were in the original Google Reader, you should check out The Old Reader

If you use RSS to just catch up on articles and webcomics in the morning, or spaced out during the day, the speed issues and the lack of automatic updates may not be an issue for you. But if you are using it to stay on top of news as they develop, Tiny Tiny RSS may not be the best choice. If the DIY aspects don't scare you off and you really want to replace Google Reader with a platform you control (and goes away only if you want it to), then you may want to consider looking at Commafeed, another open source platform with better performance.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/YgukuTz42_g/0,2817,2420834,00.asp

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