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What's the Best RSS Reader Not Named Google Reader?
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.
Feedly looks OK so far, http://theoldreader.com/ maybe?
Twitter is no replacement!
"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.
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
In my case it's newsblur.com
Only problem is that it's still a rather small operation and right now the unexpected flood of new users is wreaking havoc on its servers.
Feedly is my choice and I'm very happy that they announced a seamless transition from Google Reader to their own backend services. They were right on top of this. http://blog.feedly.com/ There are some who don't like the UI but I've never really had a problem with it. Works nicely on Chrome/ChromeOS through its plugin, on Android, iOS, even Kindle Fire.
Maybe I use RSS feeds differently than other people; but I've had trouble finding a decent reader that allows you to look at your feeds separately (on my iPad anyway - Firefox and Safari do fine if I'm on my desktop). Apparently most people like all the data all mixed in together, but I am generally reading RSS to find more targeted info - new Netflix streamable movies, for example.
#DeleteChrome
Run your own google reader:
tt-rss.org
Assuming the same content is available via twitter or facebook, it's a lot easier to miss critical information there with a constant stream. In reader I know how many updates each blog, comic or whatever has had and can easily keep up at my leisure. Instead of intermixed with all my friends on whatever social interface.
It's a much different flow from Google Reader (and every other RSS reader I've ever seen, actually), but I use Firefox Live Bookmarks exclusively.
I've tried switching away numerous times. Particularly during the entire Firefox 3.x series, which had a major bug where refreshing Live Bookmarks caused the whole browser to stop responding until it finished. With the 100+ blogs and webcomics I read, that meant every hour or so, it would freeze up for 2-3 minutes. I switched to Chrome for literally everything else, but I still kept Firefox for the Live Bookmarks. I just don't like how the others operate.
I personally used FeedDemon for the better part of a decade, which had an option to synchronize with google reader. Unfortunately the author is also ending development of the software with the Google news being the last straw, effective today.
I don't read stuff while moving anyway. Liferea (Desktop app).
Some apps are WYSIWYG. Some others are WYSIWTF.
BazQux is nice and fast: http://bazqux.com/ That's a web-based one. Imports your subscriptions from Google Reader.
I really miss the RSS functionality from the last version of Apple Mail. I really liked being able to have my favorite feeds in the same place as my email, but separate from my Inbox. It was nice that each feed was separate, instead of munged together.
Why this trend away from RSS I wonder? It is because Google wants you to use G+ as the reader for all your "feeds" in some Facebook-wannabe fashion?
Yep I'd like to filter off CNN's "fast facts" and "N things you should know about" articles, and news about certain celebrities.
Actually now that I think of it, almost all the crap I'd like to filter comes in on the CNN feed...
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I've been using Netvibes for several years now, and am mostly pleased, partly due to its "widget" mode, which lets me separate posts by feed rather than seeing them piled up by time. It will aggregate facebook, twitter, email (subject lines only), and has various widgets for just about anything: google news searches, ebay bids/sales, stock tracking, etc.
It's mobile interface, however, has some serious flaws: it reports the wrong feed name when you select a post (I think it's showing the one you previously selected), and some feeds don't display at all (TechCrunch and MAKE, I'm looking at you) -- it might just be a matter of selecting a different version of the feed, though.
Design for Use, not Construction!
My favorite used to be RSS Reader (rssreader.com), but it hasn't been updated lately. Basic simple interface: List of feeds on the left, headlines on the right. That's all I want.
You never expect irony, do you?
Want to be a professional wrestler? Visit www.iyfwrestling.com
@iyfwrestling
http://feedly.com/
I just switched, and I'm already wondering why I was on Reader for so long.
I used this before Google.... signed up again today, They are now reporting on a banner at the top that service may be slow due to many new accounts being setup, At least I didnt get the old plumber!
So Google, you're shutting down Google Reader? Yeah, well... I'm gonna go build my own Web-Based RSS Reader with blackjack and hookers. In fact, forget the RSS Reader! I have been a avid Google Reader user for 3-4+ years. I check it every break at work and usually first thing in the morning on my Tablet and at night before I go to bed. Love it. After hearing this, EVERY other web based RSS / Reader site was slammed and down. Then I thought... what if any of those services just randomly *poof* overnight went offline, like Google Reader, but without notice? Having my own shared server, I looked into PHP / MySQL solutions. So far Tiny Tiny RSS Reader Wins out. http://tt-rss.org/ Set up and running in 20 minutes. Being a shared server I couldn't run daemons so I had to use a cron job to have it update the feeds every 10 minutes but it works great so far for the last 12 hours.
A buddy of mine wrote a Google Reader replacement back when they started making Google+ changes to it. I don't if its the best, I haven't checked out the others, but it meets my needs and I use it daily. It has some social features so you can share and comment on posts with your friends as well. http://1kpl.us/ (The name is a reference to when you have too many feeds and not enough time to read them - the old Reader counter would simply say "1000+" once you hit 1k unread posts)
So I see two sorts of things being mentioned:
-Desktop/Phone applications that have no idea what you have read/not read on other devices
-Hosted RSS readers that do not have that problem, but could just as easily be shut down at the whim of the operator.
What about self-hosted alternatives internet accessible? Install something on my own http server and go to town (e.g. like roundcube or squirrelmail for email). RSS reading is sufficiently low load that even most home internet connections suffice to serve it up to you personally.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
If I can't code against it, it's not good enough.
This signature has Super Cow Powers
Emacs with Gnus is a nice low-bandwidth way to check your feeds. I'm not kidding either.
Google has quite some balls sending me an email today asking me to upgrade my personal Google Apps account to their business tier today. Only $5/month!
You know what I would pay for? Google Reader.
(For the record, the reason I don't upgrade is because I'm a single user of the domain, but have 3 accounts - one personal, one for root, and one for a separate alerts mailbox...labels don't suffice yet).
FeedDemon will still work as a standalone desktop app after GR shuts down, you just won't be able to sync article read/starred status across multiple systems, but it appears not work with Windows 8 and as noted above there will be no further development
Since we're on the topic, does anyone know a good RSS reader that I can install on my own web server?
I currently use Gregarius but the project is no longer under development.
I don't want a desktop based one as I need to ensure it checks the feeds whether my computer is on or not. Also, there's nothing more convenient than simply clicking links within a browser.
Beetle B.
Honestly? Yes, it's a shameless plug, but my favorite RSS reader is the one I wrote myself, unspectacularly named 'blindRSS' (google it, I'm not yet THAT shameless). Okay, I am: https://github.com/blind-coder/blindRSS/tree/dev
Main advantage IMO: Runs on your own server.
See my blog for my free opinions.
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 and RSSLounge 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.
BeyondPod is my RSS client of choce. It is for mobile platforms (Windows and Android), and has a ton of features (including an in-built media player for podcasts, scheduling capabilities, etc.).
You have no clue. Google Reader aggregates all of those bookmarks into one web site. With your method, if you have 35 web sites you like to read, you have to open 35 bookmarks to see if they've posted anything new. With Google Reader, you only have to visit one site to see if any of those 35 sites has been updated. And even if they only post snippets in the RSS feed (most I use show full articles), it's still tons more convenient than visiting each website to see if they have new articles.
The only way you can be sure that software will be around forever is if you have the source and are able to compile it yourself.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Firefox is all you need. You also eliminate the need for a second program to do what amounts to having "live" bookmarks. Get it, eliminate chrome and reader in one fell swoop.
Maybe I'm old fashioned. I use the NewsFox add-in to Firefox at work, and Thunderbird at home. They are not cloud based. I keep my own data, so I don't need to worry about people shutting off service...
*gasp* Yes I use MS Outlook. Just so it's all sorted together with my email.
Long, long ago, I started using Sage with Firefox. When it was sort-of abandoned, I moved to Sage-Too.
Then, the main developer of Sage-Too went on a rant about not liking ad blockers, and left. Problem is, I like ad blockers and hate people who force me not to use them. The Sage project resumed working, but it didn't work with Ad Block. I managed to keep using Sage Too until I couldn't avoid upgrading from Firefox 3.6x. At that point, I cobbled together something with PHP on my local Apache server, plus Stylish in Firefox, to keep using a very Sage-like interface with Ad Block.
Point is, I'd never use an RSS reader that was on a remote server. Now my main problem is that while Firefox converts RSS feeds to HTML, Google Chrome doesn't. If I found a good RSS-to-HTML converter in PHP, I'd probably have an at-least-Github-ready "Sage Three".
(T>t && O(n)--) == sqrt(666)
What I like (or liked...) about Google Reader was that I could read some things at home on my Mac, some other at work on my PC and some others in between on mobile phone, and that the "read" status is synchronized.
I am ready to switch to anything else, as long as I can keep on reading stuff from everywhere. I am ready to install client applications.
Any idea ?
My problem is that I liked being able to dump all of my feeds into Google Reader as sort of a central storage, then use various iOS apps to read them later on. I do not have time to read them during the day, so a desktop application or web reader is useless to me. I just want a central convenient storage area for my feeds and a good mobile app to read them later that night. I will have to hold off moving my Google Reader feeds until I see where Reeder may be going with their app development.
I posted a similar comment in the first Reader thread, but what I'm looking for is an RSS reader for Android with support for alt text (aka mouseover text). Google Reader, amazingly, has this. It's the only Android app--RSS reader or even web browser--that I've found that will let you read alt text. And yes, xkcd is a big motivator, but it turns out xkcd is popular enough that products like Pulse have special feeds with the alt text built in. The same can't be said for the myriad of other webcomics I read that use alt text.
The Brief plugin for Firefox. Look at them aggregated, look at them separate, your choice. Been using it for a long time. It's simple, and it works. At least for me.
I know I don't know what I don't know.
And even that assumes you have a working compiler for your machine.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Anyone who can use bookmarks and Google has no need for an RSS reader. RSS as a whole is just a solution to a problem that never existed in the first place.
But how do you know the site updated its contents in the first place? Would you manually go to 24 sites (the number of RSS feeds I currently have) just to find out if any of them have updated their contents? Also, don't diss on snippets. Why do papers have abstracts/summaries when I can read the whole thing I am interested in? A snippet is somewhere between a sensational headline and a long text that (should) give me a good 10 second idea on whether I want to read the whole article. If you have feeds that might have 10-20 updates each cycle, it can be quite tedious to go to each article and peruse it trying to get a summary of the article.
I don't think that most people who weren't avid Google Reader users have any idea how it was used. Suggesting Twitter or Live Bookmarks as an alternative is absurd. Reader was great for putting feeds into categories and helping you keep track of what has been read. Once you read something, it didn't show up again unless you starred it. You could search your old articles, forward them, share them, or do nearly anything that you needed to do. It was simply the best was to manage large volumes of news/web updates without getting bogged down. I'm working with Feedly and a few of the others now, but the fast and simple interface of Reader will be sorely missed.
If you have a program and a company stops supporting it, it means no more patches. In the cloud, it means it's gone forever and you're out of luck.
RSS is the button at the top of Firefox, it shows when the page has an rss fee, you click it, it subscribes and the entry in the bookmark menu looks like title menu with a popout list of articles.... I do a quick access, it pulls the list and I see what's new. I don't get what Google reader was, or why I would care.
Seriously, I'm missing the problem here, why do you need something special for that?
I can't imagine visiting a special site for it, when my RSS feeds are right there on the bookmarks menu.
Can someone explain what the real problem is here??
Different strokes.
I use the Firefox RSS too and love it. On my desktop. On my mobile devices, I prefer Pulse, though. Even though their latest UI "improvement" for selecting sets of feeds is really annoying, I love the way I can see all those headlines and thumbnails at a glance.
I wanted a web-based reader, and did some searching last night.
I decided I wanted to go with a self-hosted option, and found SelfOSS. It's light-weight, PHP5 and the code is very clean. It can use MySQL or SQLite.
It's a single-person reader, with one username/password supported.
http://selfoss.aditu.de/
You can see a live demo here: http://stuporglue.org/selfoss/
The only downside so far is that with SQLite, the database locks when updates are running. This is fairly quick, but might be an issue for some people.
https://www.facebook.com/digitizeicm -- Show your support for the digitization of the Iron County Miner newspaper archiv
One HTML5 webpage.
That's it.
Pull the RSS feeds once an hour. Use HTML5 to store the data. Use Javascript to write the HTML. It doesn;t have to be fancy.
Bonus if I can 'install' my own CSS.
I'll save it on Dropbox, Google Drive, Mega.co.nz or even my own local storage.
I haven't kept up my skills, so that's me out. It's a weekend's work for someone...
Help a nerd out?
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
isn't a new RSS reader but a new RSS syncing standard. Google Reader let people use several different viewers and they would all stay in sync: what was marked read here was marked read over there too. (OPML lets you import and export a list of subscriptions, but not a list of read items.) Clearly, relying on a single company to provide that service was a mistake. Can we come up with an open-source standard system that won't go poof at the whim of a single website, so that people can use multiple reading platforms easily?
are we really so bored we must find the replacement OMG SKY IS FALLING on the very next day?
chances are that two months from now you'll have better auto migration tools and the people recommending you a replacement have then actually used the replacements for more than a day.
personally I don't find the need for a rss reader to be that big. niche blogs tend to be best read at many articles at a time and and major stuff hits sites like slashdot at least twice so.. if the actual site is too fucking crappy to read on phone or browser I'm not going to read their articles anyhow.
and personally I've had the opinion as well that if you trench yourself into reading news just from your feeds you'll end up getting just a small slice. I often read the related articles, followups on other sites etc. and google for extra information on the subject if it's interesting. some rare stuff I have emailed(dilbert).
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Two main advantages Google Reader had over Firefox RSS bookmarks:
Firefox RSS bookmarks provide a workable RSS solution, but it was just much easier to keep up to date on a large number of feeds with Google Reader.
I was pretty happy with Bloglines until it was to be killed in 2010 (a white knight rescued it, http://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/110510-bloglines-shutdown-avoided-as-merchantcircle.html but I had already switched to google reader by that time). I'd consider returning to it, since it remains alive, though am also open to some of the other alternatives being shared.
A: Aaron Schwartz
Seriously, Google should release all sources under a BSD-derived license, with a memorial dedication to Aaron, in place of the UC Regent's notice.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
I actually love Opera's feeder. Clean, simple, not beholden to web services like Google. Of course, this comes with its own set of problems:
1) Requires installing another browser and a proprietary one at that
2) Opera's mail client is utter shit (hence the reason I use Thunderbird for my E-mail or I'd just use Opera and have a one-stop.
3) Opera tends to have good releases then buggy ones. Stick to the odd point releases.(12.11, 12.13, etc. 12.14 has issues with certain pages hanging again).
I call it 'The Aristocrats'
I do a quick access, it pulls the list and I see what's new. I don't get what Google reader was, or why I would care.
Seriously, I'm missing the problem here, why do you need something special for that?
I have 100+ RSS feeds. What you're describing doesn't sound like it scales at all. I'm not going through 100+ bookmarks to see what's new, I want an RSS reader to display new items.
I use Sage. Very unobtrusive, no need for a server account (ie. no one tracks what I'm reading), easy method to search a web page for RSS links, links are a part of my bookmarks (easy to manage, organize, back up), RSS links are copied to all of my computers as a part of the bookmarks using XMarks (make a change on one computer, the change shows up on all computers automatically). In fact, I do NOT use Chrome specifically because Chrome doesn't have Sage.
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
I use ownCloud daily for other purposes and today, with the latest update it has support for a news reader: http://algorithmsforthekitchen.com/blog/?p=479.
I just want a simple, fast RSS reader. I'm not looking for many features.
I tried a few dedicated products, but Thunderbird 2.x works best for me (I didn't try a later version). It's got a 3-pane interface, it's lightening fast (essential for browsing hundreds or thousands of headlines), you can turn off remote images for more speed and privacy (use View > Message Body As > Simple HTML), and you can navigate (mostly) by keyboard (the amazing Nostalgy extension may help here; I've used it for so long that I'm not sure how TBird works without it).
For people looking for more alternatives, here is what I found when I looked around a couple of years ago:
* Awasu (local client)
* NewsGator (local)
* Brief (Firefox addon)
Hosted:
* MyYahoo
* MyAOL
* NetVibes
* Bloglines
Also, discontinued but still available at the time:
* Newzcrawler
* FeedReader
* Sharp
* Omnea
* AmphetaDesk (FOSS)
I get systems data feeds in RSS form and would love to be able to filter the streams by relevancy of the content. Any reader that provided some filtering tools would be an upgrade.
Warning: Teh poster of this messaeg is lysdexic
most people on planet earth have never heard of RSS and don't use it. sad but tru.
That goes against all evidence presented by the fact that RSS readers are constantly on the top downloaded apps in Apple's App Store.
But certainly the least *fussiest* for me has been Feedly. Install extension, sign-in with google, bam, done.
(tip: do full article view and it's as close to gr as you can.)
All the others, oldreader, newsblur, netvibes have been bitching one way or another.
I am an ACCA student. Got a query on Accountancy/Finance? Maybe I can help!
I dont think there is an exact replacement for google reader.. maybe the features can be emulated but not the ease.. google reader can be accessed from my office network but not feedly which is blocked.. .. I just needed to sign in with my google account to check mail,rss etc .. I wish google didnt decide this.. I have been using it since 2006..
Owncloud 5 is out and it has a builtin RSS reader
For $5 a month you could rent a VPS and run Owncloud on it.
If you own or share your webhosting, what about setting the agregator just there, so you can access it from just any platform you want?
http://sourceforge.net/projects/sux0r/
You can even train it, bayesian like, to sort your very own interesting posts...
Herve S.
uh, no. not true for either top ten free apps or top ten revenue generators. they're gmail and youtube related things, plus games.
rss is great for us geeks, but the world at large not so much
I love Feedly. But it is NOT a straight RSS Reader. It personalizes and selects those stories that it thinks you want to read. It also has some pretty neat discovery features. That said, I've used Feedly for weeks, without realizing that I had missed stories from some of my favorite sites. I like to switch between Netvibes and Feedly, honestly.
It seems to work well for me...
Anyone still using My Yahoo? I've been using that since the late 90s (when it was the best aggregator by far). I have never had any reason to leave.
I love the layout... very customizable and lots of info jammed into a compact space (especially if you customize it to remove summaries and icons and use four columns). They have good stock portfolio and calendar widgets.
What am I missing out on? Why should I leave my yahoo?
I'm fine with not having the Google Reader interface as I use Reeder on Mac and iOS, but I rely on it's integration with Google Reader to 1) Have a unified place for all of my subscriptions so I don't need to manually add them (or export/import) and 2) Keep my Articles Read in sync so that I don't have to scroll through all the stuff I've already seen that day, when I get home or on another device.
I'm hoping Reeder and other RSS aggregators come up with their own cloud-based sync. Barring any current good alternatives, there's an opportunity for a start up there, me thinks.
I'm with you. I was a big user of Bloglines, then Reader, and never saw a big reason to use Twitter, G+, or Facebook.
This seems to me to be a symptom of the Old Guard/New User syndrome. We in the Old Guard used power tools on the Internet -- shell accounts, news aggregators, Usenet, etc. Those power tools are no longer being supported because the New Users want social networking and pretty graphics.
All I can say that if they try to take away my shell account I will blackout the Eastern Seaboard. Don't think I can't. Don't underestimate the power of the shell side. :)
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
I have a confession to make. I'm forbidden from surfing the web at work, so I SSH into my own BSD shell account and browse using Lynx. Yes, Lynx, the text-only web browser. It's surprisingly functional on a lot of websites, and for some bizarre reason Google Reader has a page optimized for Lynx. 80-90% of my RSS reading is through a text-only browser.
I don't see any other services meeting that need. Feedly, or any other 'app', is a non-starter. All the services I've tried so far do not work under Lynx. I think it's the end of text-only web browsing for me -- for the entire world, in fact. That's a shame; text-only browsing is much faster, and with the ability to pipe web pages to Linux commands there's a lot of power there as well.
I feel that a subtle and powerful knowledge is passing from this world.
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
I have been using Liferea for a longer time now. But then I do not need or even want everything to be web based. I like to have separate programs for separate tasks.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
"Why wouldn't I just run my web browser and read the entirety of each of those same interesting articles?"
Is this a serious question? Isn't the answer obviously "because I don't have time or desire to read 975 articles a day, but I do have the time and desire to scan past 975 headlines a day then read 22 of them"? That's my answer, anyway.
So, you use bookmarks? Can I ask you why you bother using a bookmark when you could simply memorize each URL you want to visit and manually type each one in? Oh, the answer is obviously "because that would not be as good".
I would pay for iGoogle and Reader. Once they are gone, I may just quit using Gmail and let it go to spam. I already have a Hotmail/Outlook account from school (and it isn't all that bad - surprisingly) and a paid Yahoo account. If they are putting all their focus on G+, good luck with that. Until my 70 year old mother can/will use it, I'm stuck checking Facebook every day.
So, the old reader seems to be having problems with the sudden influx of refugees. I was able to login, but import is currently disabled, so I can't import all my feeds from G Reader yet. Hopefully they'll find some way to scale up to the new demand, soon.
Disclosure: I'm an (unpaid) beta tester.
This is hands down the best RSS reader I've ever used, and I think tablet computers are by far the best platform for reading RSS feeds. Mr. Reader is elegant, massively customizable, and constantly improving. I use it every day and I can't recommend it more highly.
It currently synchs with Google Reader, and like every active RSS reader client the developer is now researching a replacement RSS service.
I'm generally "Interesting," "Insightful," and even "Funny" here. What the hell happens to me at parties?
Many employers use web blocking software and a couple of the alternatives listed below are not accessible. I can adapt to just using my desktop at home and phone but browsing via Reader on breaks at work let me keep up with Hack a Day and other stupidly blocked sites. (Because the word hack upsets the net nanny.) And cloud services are blocked, too, so I can't sync to Dropbox or Box, either. Hopefully by the time the dust settles, there will be better alternatives but I'm not impressed with the choices at the moment.
https does not work.
We have the best government that money can buy.
Not the same as a reader, but I switched to doing everything feed-related via email a while ago, always local, always available, handy since that's where I spend most of my time, and most usefully for me, means that everything is searchable in local email archives.
http://blogtrottr.com/
My main use of Google Reader these days is to consolidate the RSS feeds from several specific news sources of my choosing. Then I pass this RSS list to the Google Reader Android ticker widget which is the best of its class. This allows me a nice, clean rotating news widget with the specific news sources I want. Not only that, but I can manage the feeds used from my desktop.
I have not found anything else that can do this, or looks as good, let alone both. I have no alternative once Google Reader goes away. :(
I don't like webservices because I have no control over it.
IMAP is a nice protocol and there are clients for everything, offline modes, etc. Then RSS items can easily be managed, sorted, searched, forwarded...
I use a perl program named "plagger" that need a bit of time to set up (and patch, if you like to), but I guess there are other ways.
Google Listen, the Android podcatcher that Google designed to work with Google Reader, has been dead for a while now, but it was still usable because Google Reader was still working even if they didn't update the Android app. However, it looks like the demise of Google Reader itself will doom Google Listen to uselessness.
Of course, Google claims they dropped Google Listen because there were apps out there that did the same thing better, so it's not exactly the end of the world.
Signatures are a waste of bandwi (buffering...)
Been using Feedly for a bit. Requires Google Reader to login at the minute (It's built upon Google Reader) but they're going to migrate all accounts automatically once Google Reader shuts down. Really nice site, clean and simple.
What I loved about Google Reader was the vi bindings. Any of the best-of-class alternatives support that?
I sense a conspiracy to push everything to g+ and kill RSS in general.
RSS generally doesn't have a lot of benefit for anyone but the person socuming the content, and then it's more or less a replacement for reading the old UUNet NetNews and keeping track of where you were at across devices. It has the negative benefit for most content creators that most RSS readers permit filtering of the RSS stream to remove their monetization.
On a per sit basis, the RSS reader has the vendor disadvantage of denying them lock-in. If you can get your G+, Facebook, and Twitter streams all in one place, then it keeps you from tying your product to their private APIs, which is of less benefit to then than had you tied your product to their APIs.
In general, RSS content is a lose-lose proposition for anyone doing anything with content streaming who wants you to buy into their ecosystem. For G+, for example, it means that you aren't going to tie your information organization into the idea of organizing things as "circles"; Facebook, it means you aren't going to necessarily buy into their "TimeLine" concept, and so on.
So yeah, if you want to have an RSS feed reader, expect it to have to come from some place other than someone with an advertising supported business model, particularly if they have their own information streaming model they are trying to monetize.
If you think you can figure a way to monetize RSS streams in any scalable way, you should feel free to found your own reader application company, and go for it. There are several companies attempting to move in this direction already, so you'll have competition, and you probably won't get to Google Reader level quality quickly, particularly since you will have a small team. Google Reader attracted a lot of 20%'ers, and if nothing else, Google's back end is built for building and deploying stuff like this reliably, and getting syncing, etc. right the first time, or to keep chipping at it or have a 20%-er pitch in and get it right the 15th time, in rapid iteration.
Daily Rotation has been around for 14 years now....
DAILY ROTATION
ownCloud News is in alpha, but it is not a third party app - so it's pretty good quality. https://github.com/owncloud/apps/tree/master/news and the main guys blog (screenshots): http://algorithmsforthekitchen.com/blog/
Hopefully there is a public instance running ownCloud News for those people who don't run their own ownCloud instance. Most instances will probably enable ownCloud News when it comes out of alpha (very soon I think).
Decent RSS reader for Linux.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Why do people keep suggesting that Twitter is somehow in any way a reasonable replacement for a good RSS client? I really don't get it, but maybe other people use RSS like twitter, or something...
I have many (~100) RSS feeds sorted into a few categories (one is news sites, one is webcomics, for example). Rather than manually polling all these sites I check my RSS list to scan through the post titles, then open new tabs *at the original site* for whatever items I actually want to read (control-click the little icon in Firefox). This makes sure the sites get their advertising and that I don't miss out on the things I want to know about. It's not rocket science, but it's been damn near impossible to find a tool that let me do this. It seems like a reasonable thing to want to do.
I guess the Open Source "way" is that I should start up a project with other disenfranchised code-savvy people and write something better, but I'm married with a full-time job and other issues with prior claim on my free time, so that ain't flying unless I win the lottery. Plus Google Reader is really slickly done. Everything else I've looked at is still crap by comparison in it's interface.
You forgot the "dot-org" at the end of your url: http://tt-rss.org/redmine/projects/tt-rss/wiki http://tt-rss.org/redmine/projects/tt-rss/wiki/FrequentlyAskedQuestions
It's called http://www.weegeeks.com/
It's utter, utter, rubbish and has no features other that reformatting your chosen live RSS feeds into a readable clean format.
The point is... It's perfect for me, does just what I want - no more, no less.
Instead of you all rushing to Feedly like lemmings, why not explore what's involved in creating your own? There's no innovation any more... Where did all the hobbyist coders go ?
-Jar
Together, We Can Make Slashdot Better. I Do NOT Mod ACs. - Check Me Out
I have been using RSSowl for years and will keep doing so as I never found a better reader. Runs almost everywhere, displays RSS, manages feeds and is quite configureable.
uh... and it's free and open source, of course.
Oh, the beautiful gloss of greality!
hg clone https://code.google.com/p/google-reader/
I use the pyrfeed Google Reader API to aggregate categories of other sites' RSS/Atom feeds to my personal website. Basically, Google Reader is a aggregator, feed subscriber, database, and single API/XML for my website.
https://code.google.com/p/pyrfeed/wiki/GoogleReaderAPI
Do any of the web-based aggregators people are suggesting here offer a similar API?
And even that assumes you have a working compiler for your machine.
Well, if it is a web app, all you need is one service provider in the accessible part of the world, where you can host the app, and a machine (say, a fridge) which can access the web.
If you have any sites, which update at intervals, and you want to read the new content when it comes? In other words, do you find going to a website to see if it has updated? Do you perhaps have bookmark folders,which you use by opening all bookmarks in the folder in tabs, then going through them? If you do, please stop! Start using RSS and make your life a lot better.
Web comics and blogs are squarely in this category, for example, as are rarely updated news feeds (often for software products etc).
Tiny Tiny RSS has filters, but there's also Yahoo! Pipes, which works with every reader.
Dilbert RSS feed
Host it yourself: http://tt-rss.org/
Dilbert RSS feed
Keeping up with anything besides MM crap without wasting half a day opening different websites which only update once in a while.
If you're content reading aggregators like Slashdot, it doesn't offer you much, but if you want to read say, Lambda-the-Ultimate, it's much less annoying to be told when there's new content.
Dilbert RSS feed
I speak as someone who hosts his own email, website, RSS client, etc: paraphrasing an often quoted saying, "it's only $5 a month if your time has no value".
While I enjoy administrating it, it's not set it and forget it, unless you want some security flaw in ownCloud to allow someone to break in and delete your stuff, or worse. You need to monitor it, keep up with updates, deal with larger upgrades that might break your stack, etc.
Dilbert RSS feed
Down with Google, down with Chrome, and good riddance to Google Reader. Maybe it will wake a few people up.
http://www.accountkiller.com/en/delete-slashdot-account Stop visiting Slashdot.
Well, the Internet is better and do you know why? Because it's not a product but build on open standards like HTTP.
The question is not what product is a replacement for Google Reader, but how we can manage to not rely on products anymore but on a standard for what it does. And then have hundreds of servers and clients implementing that standard to chose from and have them compete for greatness. Like, you know, on the Internet.
God, what have we come to. First we let Google soak up all the market for such services, then we look at Google either throwing their products away or cutting off support for standards (like ActiveSync or CalDAV) and what do we do? We look for OTHER proprietary products to be herded into a corral by. A smaller one, granted. And then another smaller one. And then the butcher comes.
Have fun in there, it's surely nice and warm and there is comfort in numbers, right? RIGHT?
I've turned around and now go for the plains instead.
Not a single mention of of the web browser Opera, which has a fantastic rss reader built in (and it does email, too!). Of course, it doesn't sync between computers, but that's nothing a little Spideroak (or similar) won't fix.