Tiny Tiny RSS Feed Reader

Lately, I've been missing something in a feed reader. In the past six months or so I've tried a plethora of different readers of different forms. I tried the desktop application style like Lifrea, the online flavors like Google Reader, and the Firefox extension kind like Sage. All have their benefits, but also disadvantages. For example offline readers make it a pain when one uses different machines, online reader services felt slow or sluggish, and cluttered. Not to mention they can't be modified.

I forget now how I heard about Tiny Tiny RSS now, but if I remember I'll update this post with well deserved props. This thing is perfect in my opinion. It's fast, it's open source, it's written in PHP/MySQL, and it's pretty feature complete. Even setup was a breeze and went without a hitch.

The interface is very clean and well organized. One can tell pretty early that some of the interface ideas in TTRSS were inspired by Google's great GMail interface like the ability to star articles as well as the familiar actions list, and in fact it very much has the feel of using your typical desktop email application. This reader can run in either single or multi-user modes, and you can publish your feeds and articles with others with a single click.

I'll not provide a list of features here since they do a pretty good job of that on their website. If you are not in love with your current reader, I very strongly suggest this gem!

Replacing Mono Applications

Since Novell admits to violating software patents in their code, and points at you and I for using offending software, I'm making an attempt to partially rid my machines of it. First to go, of course, is anything related to Mono. This means Banshee, F-Spot and Beagle need replacements. Replacing Banshee won't be a big deal in my case, since I don't really listen to music on my computer very often anyways. Also there must be a ton of music players out there. I think QuodLibet wins in this category for now just because it's written in Python.

F-Spot will be a little more difficult for me to get rid of since I've become quite accustomed to using it. For the time being, however, I'll switch back to using the quite capable gThumb. Also since F-Spot uses a weird format for storing data (meaningless directory structures etc), there will be some effort required in converting it to something that makes sense to use with gThumb.

Beagle has already been replaced by the much faster, leaner, and command line friendly Tracker. This was a switch that would have happened regardless of Novell's actions, so I've got no problems there. I'll not go into great detail about Tracker now since this would probably warrant its own post, but this is a project that I hope has a bright future.

Removing Mono and all (I think) related packages from your Ubuntu install is as easy as:

sudo aptitude remove libmono0

That will remove all kinds of stuff, including the ubuntu-desktop package. Read the list of packages before pressing Y so that you have no suprises. As of Edgy, Ubuntu ships with Mono since Tomboy and F-Spot are in the default desktop configuration. I am curious to see where Canonical takes this, if anywhere at all. It's probably about time I moved on anyways.

PS: To all of you who are pointing at me, laughing, and shrieking "I told you so!", yeah yeah I know... I guess I should have seen this coming.