Since the death of Google Reader there have been some talks regarding what application that could take over – be the “next Google Reader” – as it was well used as a point for sync your RSS between smartphones/handheld devices and computers. There are many programs that used Google Reader as one of their backbones to handle RSS subscriptions, which feeds that were read etc. Some alternatives popped up in the wake of Google Reader’s oncoming closure, and many was hoping for their favorite RSS application to support these new services instead. Many did what they could in order to have the transition from Google Reader to their own service as easy as possible to simplify it for the users.

I have used Feedly for a while, but since it seems  as there has been  some issues regarding link hijacking etc I started to look for alternatives. The main function I was after was the ability to have my RSS feeds in sync between my computer and my iPhone. Eearlier, when the word of Google Reader’s demise first reached the masses, I used Selfoss and it worked quite well. I even wrote a small how to-ish thing about it here & part 2 here (in Swedish). It sports a nice clean interface that works well both on the computer, iPad and iPhone. It worked quite well, but due to the lack of a dedicated application I later moved to Feedly instead.

But yesterday I took another look at what was available to solve this issue and I settled for Tiny Tiny RSS.

Installation:

Tiny Tiny RSS (from now abbreviated as “tt-rss”) requires a basic LAMP server. From their requirements page:

• PHP version 5.3 or newer (detailed PHP requirements)
• PostgreSQL or MySQL (InnoDB is required, MyISAM will not work).

After you have a LAMP server setup it is just to follow the installation instructions of tt-rss:

1. Download the installation tar ball (check the site for the latest version, when writing this v 1.11 was available).
2. Move it to where you wish to have it installed on your LAMP-server and unzip it: tar zxfv Tiny-Tiny-RSS-1.x.x.tar.gz
3. Rename the unpacked folder to tt-rss for simple handling: mv Tiny-Tiny-RSS-1.x.x tt-rss
4. Make sure that your apache/webserver is pointed to the directory where you placed the “tt-rss” folder.
5. Access http://your.site.com/tt-rss/install/ and follow the guide there. NOTE: This require that you have already setup a database for this. I used MySQL as it was already installed on the server.
6. Default user after installation is username: admin, password: password
7. Change the password for the admin user!
8. Create a new user – if you wish – to use with TT-RSS.
9. Don’t forget to setup the page to automatically check the feeds, see UpdatingFeeds part of the documentation. I am using a cron job that runs every 15 minutes.

When it is up and running you can either add subscriptions, or import an .opml file from eg Google Reader / Feedly / application that supports OPML exporting.

Applications:

I am currently using two applications connected to my RSS-server to keep things in sync:

OSX: MicroRSS

iOS: tiny Reader RSS

So far it is working quite well, things are nicely kept in sync between the computer,iPhone and web interface.