What's the Best RSS Reader Not Named Google Reader? 287
Hugh Pickens writes writes "The news that that Google is killing off Google Reader in their annual spring cleaning means hordes of abandoned RSS users will need a new home to get their news fix before July 1, 2013. Sure, Google Reader may not have been the most beautifully designed product to come out of Mountain View, Calif., but it sure was convenient. And now that it's going away, it's evident just how valuable it has been. 'It's a tough question that's not unlike asking what's the best planet to live on not named Earth or the best thing to breathe not named air,' writes Casey Chan. 'Google Reader was that obvious a choice.' So what's the best RSS reader not named Google Reader? Is it Reeder? Or NetNewsWire? Maybe Feedly? Or should we all just ditch RSS and get with Twitter?"
Personally, I've taken a liking to Akregator on my desktop and Sparse RSS on my phone (syncing done woefully manually by exporting the list of feeds from my desktop reader and importing into the phone reader now and then). Update: 03/14 14:43 GMT by T : Depending on your aesthetics and platform of choice, you might like one of these four options, too.
Guess how the team found out (Score:4, Informative)
"There are two simple reasons for this: usage of Google Reader has declined, and as a company we’re pouring all of our energy into fewer products,” Alan Green an engineer at Google said.
The RSS team got the axe via Google Reader, which suddenly became their least favorite app.
Re:Feedly looks ok (Score:4, Informative)
I tried Feedly for a few minutes, but it felt like it was trying to prioritize and reorganize my news stories automatically for me and the design was awful for simply reading stuff. And it required simply too many clicks to read slashdot since I had to expand the whole summary for each item myself and even mark items as read manually. Not going back.
I'm giving Feedly a try starting today, and I think you probably have the same reaction I did: It's NOT EXACTLY THE SAME AS GREADER. But it's learnable, and it's customizable.
Keyboard shortcuts exist, but they're all different than GReader, and that takes some getting used to.
If you like GReader's compact title-only view, that's an option -- but you can also show everything by default, which is preferable if you have a folder of comics feeds like I do.
I think Feedly has two big points in its favor, though: it can sync ONCE to GReader to download your feeds (including what articles you've already read), and it's cross-browser and cross-platform with its own mobile apps. (Plus it's ad-supported, which means they have a revenue stream to keep them going in the future.)
Re:Feedly looks ok (Score:3, Informative)
Everything you just complained about can be changed in the preferences.
http://blog.feedly.com/2013/03/14/tips-for-google-reader-users-migrating-to-feedly/ might be of interest for you.
Have your own server? Tiny Tiny RSS (Score:4, Informative)
If applicable: host it yourself (Score:4, Informative)
Self-hosting solutions are available, will never get canned in this manner, and are highly customizable. But, of course, require a place to host it.
I've tried both Tiny Tiny RSS [tt-rss.org] and RSSLounge [aditu.de] before in an attempt to rid myself of the Google Reader addiction, but found them both lacking in some respects every time. Since Google Reader is disappearing though, I made a new attempt this morning.
RSSLounge seems to have been abandoned a year or two ago, but perhaps it was stable enough (RSS aggregation is not nuclear science).
Tiny Tiny RSS have some in my eyes quite horrible default settings, especially coming from Google Reader. The good news, however, is that it is configurable to mimic Google Reader quite closely. With some work with custom CSS rules it is quite close at a first glance.
My Tiny Tiny RSS configuration:
Last time I installed it on Debian I ran into enough caveats that it led me to write a guide for others to install it, but since then it has been included in the unstable repository. To install it, some manual work was still needed, though:
Then go to http://localhost/tt-rss and start configuring. All subscriptions can be exported from Google Reader and imported in Tiny Tiny RSS, keeping dirctory structure intact.
I'll try to migrate fully to this solution now that Google apparently no longer wants my traffic :-) . I'd say I probably use Reader the most of all Google's services, including Search, Gmail, Youtube, etc., so the decision to can it is quite strange from my personal view.
Re:If applicable: host it yourself (Score:2, Informative)
Ah, I found out what happened to RSSLounge: it was superseded by the author's new project Selfoss [aditu.de]. Probably also an alternative to check out, though a lot of project communication seem to be in German, which might be a problem for some :-) .
Re:Tiny Tiny RSS (Score:2, Informative)
There's also gritttt-rss (http://gritttt-rss.nicolashoening.de/) which extends tt-rss with some sharing and import features. I haven't tried installing either yet.