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.

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.