18:24 Friday, October 10 2009

tiny tiny

Over the past year, I've started accumulating RSS feeds that I read to the extent that I'm now tracking 22. Some of them are relatively low traffic (less than a dozen posts/day), however others generate hundreds each day. While that alone isn't an issue, the retention policies of the different feeds differ widely with some only purging every few months, others were nuking their posts every few hours. I had been using Thunderbird for RSS, but it was a hassle to keep it running 24/7 (especially if I wasn't even home). It wasn't all that great of an RSS reader, with a tendency to corrupt itself every so often (I'd end up with 50% of the articles being localized duplicates), and it was dumb to have it running just to poll the servers for new posts. Purely by accident, I stumbled across an excellent alternative, Tiny Tiny RSS (ttrss). ttrss is basically a feed aggregator which uses(or prefers) PostgreSQL as its backend, and then has a GMail like frontend. Setup was pretty simple (took me about 20 minutes, including reading the dox), and importing all the feeds from Thunderbird was dead simple (I just exported from thunderbird in OMPL format, and then imported directly into ttrss). I spent another hour tweaking my preferences, and its been a joy to use since then. An added benefit is that it supports multiple user accounts (which is good if Denise ever wants it, plus it allows me to password protect my feeds). It also supports the creation of custom feeds, so if I ever wanted to, I could create publicly accessible custom RSS feeds. Additionally, it supports keyboard shortcuts for just about everything, so I can treat it like a console app even though its running inside my web browser.