Newsreader Update
After the demise of Google Reader in 2013 I found the open source clone Tiny Tiny RSS and I've been using it to subscribe to websites ever since. I installed it on my own server, customized the interface quite a bit, and wrote a few plugins. And because I had put a lot of time into modifying it by editing the source files directly, I didn't upgrade it. Ever.
Tiny Tiny RSS has been evolving over the years and it's pretty ridiculous that I didn't upgrade. I probably missed 1,000+ bug fixes and performance enhancements releases in the last five years.
Earlier this week I was looking at the latest version and found that the PHP requirements changed. One does not simply upgrade PHP. "We're in the future now," I thought, "Shouldn't this all be serverless?" It's not. I did find something neat in the process though.
A company called Bitnami has an AWS image with Tiny Tiny RSS installed along with everything you need to run it. I threw this on the smallest AWS instance (a t2.micro) and had a more recent version up and running in minutes. It took a few more minutes to get a free LetsEncrypt cert going for SSL, a trifling more to run the feed updater as a service, and finally a smattering more minutes to export/import my subscriptions. But minutes none the less!
The new version means I can finally use a real iOS app to read as well. Reeder 3 for iOS is free now and works with Tiny Tiny RSS if you use the Fever API plugin. (Although it seems like the project is abandoned and I needed to add a couple lines of code to get it working; hooray open source life.)
And to top it all off I only directly edited one source file. So I'm learning. Here's to another five years of this particular version of Tiny Tiny RSS!
Tiny Tiny RSS has been evolving over the years and it's pretty ridiculous that I didn't upgrade. I probably missed 1,000+ bug fixes and performance enhancements releases in the last five years.
Earlier this week I was looking at the latest version and found that the PHP requirements changed. One does not simply upgrade PHP. "We're in the future now," I thought, "Shouldn't this all be serverless?" It's not. I did find something neat in the process though.
A company called Bitnami has an AWS image with Tiny Tiny RSS installed along with everything you need to run it. I threw this on the smallest AWS instance (a t2.micro) and had a more recent version up and running in minutes. It took a few more minutes to get a free LetsEncrypt cert going for SSL, a trifling more to run the feed updater as a service, and finally a smattering more minutes to export/import my subscriptions. But minutes none the less!
The new version means I can finally use a real iOS app to read as well. Reeder 3 for iOS is free now and works with Tiny Tiny RSS if you use the Fever API plugin. (Although it seems like the project is abandoned and I needed to add a couple lines of code to get it working; hooray open source life.)
And to top it all off I only directly edited one source file. So I'm learning. Here's to another five years of this particular version of Tiny Tiny RSS!