I’m a huge fan of google reader for keeping up with news (not just headlines a la NYT; it’s also incredibly handy to consolidate security update notices). Unfortunately, they’re spinning it down on July 1st of this year (if somehow you haven’t paid attention to the internets at all this week). Perhaps the best tense to use then is that I was a google reader fan.
Having a cloud-based solution is nice, and there are a few out there that offer RSS/Atom/etc. aggregation as a service (I’ve heard about Feedly a fair amount, for example). Since I already have a host, though, and a fair amount of willingness to wrench on things if need be, I thought I’d look into running my own web-based feed viewer. Two options jumped out immediately, Selfoss and Tiny Tiny RSS (aka tt-rss). Notably, both support OPML import so that it is not difficult to get your feeds imported from Google.
Selfoss is probably the simpler of the two, and has had more attention paid to visual design. I noticed that as it stood, the project supported mysql and sqlite as storage engines. So I forked it on github, worked in a first cut at postgresql support, and sent the author a pull request. It’s the first time I can recall doing that via github, and he sent me a nice note thanking me for the additional DB engine support after he merged it in. It’s a good feeling to contribute to something! Selfoss is pretty cool in that by design it would allow you to aggregate more than RSS/Atom (e.g. I saw IMAP support), and adding more “spouts” (source types) looked fairly modular. The drawback, in as much as it is one, is that the system presently only seems to support single user mode. You may also have to do some fiddling with .htaccess and similar to get it stood up. But if you have a reasonable amount of savvy and want something for yourself alone, it’s a decent option.
TT-RSS is a larger and more complicated beast that is a bit more plain in design, but it is also more feature-ful. Postgres is supported out of the box, and there is an Android client that can sync with your tt-rss install as well. The big selling point is that it supports multi-user mode. I have an install of it working on this host; if you are a fellow greader refugee and want to give it a spin let me know. My only real gripe with it at the moment is that it presents a three-pane interface (at least by default, I have not looked too hard into changing it) similar to Outlook Web Access if you’ve used that. I’d prefer a more consolidated two-pane layout (similar to greader) but I’ll live. I probably spend more time reading RSS et al. via my phone anyway, and the Android client is nice. Note that if you wish to use it with a tt-rss install, you have to set the external API access preference in your user preferences to true.
All of this does make me think about what it would take to replace google entirely with things I host. Mail is not an issue. Calendaring is something that I probably could figure out, but haven’t felt the need to just yet (maybe I ought to, if this trend continues). Reader is already replaced. GDocs, or Drive, or whatever they’re calling it this week would be hard to replace in the sense of seamless concurrent editing, but it’s not like LibreOffice+git/svn or a wiki couldn’t serve in a pinch. Search and maps seem like the real boogers to replace with entirely self-sufficient infrastructure. If it came to it, I suppose a standalone GPS device would serve for most of what I need maps for, or I could look into OpenStreetMaps I guess (similarly to what Craigslist has done). Search is something that would be hard to replace as an individual simply due to the storage requirements of the data involved in a whole-web crawl I imagine. The tools are there with something like Nutch, but… yikes. I’ll likely continue to use Google products when they are convenient, and will have to hope they don’t decide to axe anything else I use routinely.