Google has announced that they are terminating the Google Reader application. I’ve written before about the risks of depending on web services, and well, for those users of this service, it is time to look out for options. At least they play nice and thanks to the Data Liberation Front you can export all your data for other services.
I’ve seen many posts about alternative RSS feed readers out there. But when they talk about open source feed readers they refer to desktop clients, and when they don’t make the freedom distinction, they mention proprietary web services. But these days, with all the mobility and multiple devices, who wants a desktop feed reader?
If you are worried about another web service you love to use might go dark in the future, there is hope. Here are some good free and open web based RSS feed reader clients you can use as Google Reader alternatives and host them yourself.
Newsblur
A very nice looking site, with responsive design for mobile devices. You can also mute or feature certain articles based on tags found in the content. Written in Python using Django, Celery, RabbitMQ, MongoDB and PostgreSQL.
Lilina
A PHP 5.2 based web reader with a simple interface. You can run it easily on any cheap shared hosting service.
Tiny Tiny RSS
It has a user interface very similar to Google Reader. It supports Authentication for reading protected feeds. Written in PHP 5.3 and supports MySQL and PostgreSQL databases.
Open WebReader
This is another PHP 5 based feed reader, with a little more elaborated user interface. Supports multiple users and the developers seem proud of their code being OOP and using the MVC pattern.
Yocto Reader
I know little about this one. The project’s web page is offline, but the code can be obtained from Debian repositories.
sudo aptitude install yocto-reader
Conclusion
Switching from Google Reader to another proprietary feed reader service makes little difference. It doesn’t solve the real issue, just solves the short term need before that other service decides to terminate the service as well or something weird happens. Hosting your own web based feed reader will provide you with the convenience of having your feeds available from any device anywhere, and be in control of your data and applications.
2 replies on “Free & Open source web based Google Reader alternatives”
Thanks Gabriel for the overview. I’m looking for tt-rss alternatives as tt-rss requires InnoDB support, which is using too much resources on my RaspBerryPi.
I don’t know of any non-InnoDB alternatives. Maybe you need to tune the MySQL settings to get better performance.