Category: Web applications

I want to keep track of all the web applications I’m trying out, and also give you a list of those web applications which I find extraordinarily useful.

Good Bye Tiny Tiny RSS / TT-RSS

Yesterday – after roughly eleven years (just checked the database entries) – I’ve decided to switch from Tiny Tiny RSS to FreshRSS. The transition was quite smooth, but I’ll get to that in a bit.

First let me point out the reasons for me wanting to switch.

  1. Feed refresh issues: About 2-3 months ago, I noticed that when I opened my feed reader app (also called Tiny Tiny RSS) on the phone, I wouldn’t see new articles. Even manually ‘pulling down’ the feed list, which used to force a refresh, didn’t do anything – same article counts as before. You would think the whole thing is broken, except that once I entered a feed, and I pulled down the article list, suddenly all the new articles appeared. So it was definitely something more subtle than “the whole thing is broken”. I tried the obvious thing: Updated the app (which I think was no longer in Google Play, so I got the new version from F-Droid). That didn’t change anything. Then I wanted to update TT-RSS on the server (which I do every couple of months, by pulling the git master branch). Then it didn’t work anymore at all, because…
  2. PHP Version compatibility: The maintainer(s) had decided that PHP 8.1 – despite being the default still in Ubuntu 22.04, and being officially supported until December 2025 – wasn’t worth supporting anymore. Because…
  3. Strong focus on Docker: In many places, for quite a while now, the maintainer(s) make it clear that they don’t care about any other way to deploy TT-RSS than via Docker. Where obviously having a newer basis with a more up-to-date PHP is trivial. I can understand that to some extent, but I just don’t feel like going the container way for something as simple as my PHP-based RSS feed aggregator webapp. I guess I’m just old-fashioned. And why didn’t I attempt to get support with my initial issue (1) from the community? Because…
  4. Unfriendly community, especially the main contributor / maintainer: From previous bug reports / feature requests (which I can’t remember in detail) I remember the harsh tone and unfriendliness, especially from the maintainer ‘fox’. I’ve met my fair share of assholes in FOSS, but he stood out and left a lasting memory. And while I was thinking about that, I also remembered an article from Flameeyes, which really unnerved me back then in 2017. I was quite close to switching to another RSS aggregator then, but since Flameyes’ ModSecurity rule must have malfunctioned or something, and I still got articles from his blog, I stuck with TT-RSS, despite definitely not being a Nazi sympathizer. Call me lazy…

So, root cause: Supermassive asshole (works like a supermassive black hole, only in the other direction – stuff comes out from it), whom I didn’t want to report a bug to (again).

So why FreshRSS?

  1. FreshRSS was really easy to set up, even without using Docker. The documentation is really good, and it took me only about an hour from start to finish (all feeds migrated, refresh cronjob set up, app installed and connected to the webapp’s API, etc.)
  2. It actually feels snappier than TT-RSS, but of course I now have a nearly empty database. It also supports two common APIs: greader and fever, which makes it compatible with various mobile clients. I picked FeedMe for now, let’s see whether I’ll stick with it.
  3. I read that the community around FreshRSS is not centered around a supermassive asshole, which is definitely a plus.

That’s it. I should now be able to consume my news and blog articles the way I like it… without having to manually refresh every feed, deployed how I like it, and with the PHP version I like.

TT-RSS 1.5.5 in Portage

I have blogged about TT-RSS just recently. And when Andrew Dolgov, TT-RSS’s initiator and main contributor released version 1.5.5, I thought I’d try to improve the ebuild a bit, given that it is in Portage now.

So I added a ‘daemon’ USE flag, which makes it easy for Gentoo users to get TT-RSS to update the RSS feeds. When you emerge www-apps/tt-rss with USE=daemon, it will now install an init script to start the ‘ttrssd’ daemon (or multiple, if you have multiple TT-RSS instances on your host). This is the preferred way to keep the feeds updated, according to TT-RSS’s documentation.

So, if you need a great, centralised (i.e. synchronised state amongst your computers, phones, etc.) news aggregator that runs on your own server / web host, give tt-rss a try! And if you’re a Gentoo user, I’d appreciate if you could test the new ebuild’s features (USE=daemon), and give feedback here or open a bug report if there is anything that could be improved further.

Reading news the way I like it

I have been using Tiny Tiny RSS (or TT-RSS) (www-apps/tt-rss in Gentoo) as my news aggregator since the end of 2008. It is a web application (written in PHP) that provides a great news aggregator UI. Since it’s a web application, you can use it from anywhere with just a browser, and thus have all your feeds in the same state (read/starred/…), anywhere you are. Think of it as Google Reader, but without Google knowing exactly what news articles you’re interested in, since you can run TT-RSS on your own server / web host.
So, TT-RSS alone was great already, but the UI is more suitable for when you have a mouse and a big browser window, than for using it from your phone.

Recently I discovered the Android App TT-RSS Reader which solves exactly that problem. It connects to your TT-RSS instance via an API, and brings all your feeds, with all their states just as on the web interface, to your Android device. The interface is specifically designed for touch screens, so it’s much easier to navigate through your feeds and articles than via the web interface. Furthermore, it can cache articles and images, which you can trigger while on WiFi before leaving the house, and then read everything on the way in Offline mode, to save mobile traffic, which is expensive and/or slow for some. When you’re back on WiFi, you switch back to Online mode, and TT-RSS Reader synchronises your state to your TT-RSS instance. Absolutely awesome 🙂

A couple of quick screenshots from the web interface (TT-RSS):


… and the Android App (TT-RSS Reader):


Update (2011-07-03): Shortly after posting this, hwoarang offered to take TT-RSS from the Sunrise Overlay into Gentoo’s main repository (Portage), with me proxy-maintaining it. So now it’s even easier to get TT-RSS onto your Gentoo-powered server.