Half-Elf on Tech

Thoughts From a Professional Lesbian

Tag: rss

  • FreshRSS: A Simpler Self Hosted RSS Manager

    FreshRSS: A Simpler Self Hosted RSS Manager

    I’ve been using Tiny Tiny RSS for … well years. Almost a decade. I like it a lot, the interface is nice and pretty to use. But there have always been some serious lingering issues with it.

    1. The developer is very opinionated, to the point of aggression
    2. The development is Docker, to the point that non-Docker support is non existent
    3. Support for ‘non modern’ browsers means Safari is not supported

    Now I’m opinionated, and I can be curt and blunt at times. And I work with a lot (A LOT) of people who are similar. I do plugin reviews for WordPress.org — trust me, I know from opinionated developers. I have lost track of the time I’ve spent arguing with prima donnas who cannot fathom that their code might not be god’s gift to the universe.

    The majority of people, thankfully, are not like that. They recognize no one is perfect, they understand that sometimes you have to make allowances in your code for the sake of a system, and most of all they aren’t aggro when told “no.” (If you find yourself getting pissed off, BTW, when someone reviews your code, yes, I’m talking about you.)

    Anyway. Andrew Dolgov is an amazing developer, a talented one at that. But he has a very ‘my way or GTFO’ kind of flow, and since it’s a single-man project, I really do get that. And for the time that he happily supported PHP on whatever, I didn’t care. The code worked, he didn’t have any strong opinions that offended me (like being a Nazi sympathizer, and yes, I’ve ditched software I love for that), and so what if he was a bit prickly?

    But… He’s Docker all in. And I like Docker, but I don’t want to run it all the time, and certainly not for a flippin’ RSS reader that is PHP and SQL and that’s it. As time went on, it got harder and harder and harder to manage and maintain a slight fork, to the point that it’s just not worth it.

    The Replacement: FreshRSS

    FreshRSS. It’s a barebones, simple, easy to install RSS reader. How easy? It’s practically a ‘famous five minute install.’

    The selling points are:

    That’s really all I needed.

    The install was to download the latest release, unzip it on my server, and then I went to the URL where I’d installed it ( i.e. https://example.com ) and entered the DB credentials. Then I made a new account and boom. Done.

    Much like with TTRSS, I have to set up a cron job to run the refresh, which I set to hourly:

    php /home/username/example.com/app/actualize_script.php > /home/username/FreshRSS.log 2>&1

    Now I have to migrate my content to actually have something to check.

    The Migration

    First up, you have to export from TTRSS, which is not as obvious as all that. The best way is via command line:

    $ php ./update.php --opml-export "ipstenu:ipstenu.opml"

    Don’t waste time with the various plugins, they’re not supported and in my experience, don’t work. Also if you’re mystified trying to find out how to export, it’s not just you. I had to trawl through the forums to find an example that didn’t work, but did link me to the code and I was able to figure it out from there.

    Once you have that, save the OPML file and pop over to FreshRSS and import. It will keep your categories and everything.

    Yeah, that was it!

    The Tweaks

    Most of the settings are fine as is. I turned off the option to mark as read when I scroll by (I regularly use unread to know what I need to handle next):

    I also added in a filter to mark a specific feed as read unless it mentions a keyword which was as easy as a filter for -intitle:keyword to that feed.

    I picked a theme that made me happy to boot.

    All in all, it was a super easy move.

  • Goodbye Google Reader

    Goodbye Google Reader

    Ain't no one fucks with tiny hippo
    Credit: Poorly Drawn Lines
    You know, I get it. RSS is not a popular tool for people who like the ‘river’ flow of data. If you like everything to flow into your stream and back out, like Tumblr or Twitter or Facebook, then the loss of Google Reader is meaningless to them. “Why do I want another inbox?” they argue. That’s all fine and dandy for you, but we have to accept that different people process data differently. Some people like to watch news come in live, like reading a CNN ticker, and if they miss it that’s okay. Others of us like to say ‘These are the things I like, save a note when they happen and I’ll read them when I can.’ They’re two different workflows, and they appeal to different people.

    Me? I’ve been using Tiny Tiny RSS for just under a year now, and I’ve actually figured out how to do everything I want, with key-commands. Since I use multiple devices for my news consumption (two laptops, an iPad, etc etc) having this web-based was a real killer. And while I could use a cloud device, I’ve never found one that worked across Windows and Macintosh, and wasn’t blocked by The Bank. That’s less of an issue now, but having it all on my own server beings me back to my oldest bugaboo ever: Owning my data.

    If there’s anything you get from the whole Google Reader fiasco, it should be this: Google gave, and Google has taken away. Everyone who is mad that Google “Broke their trust.” just hasn’t been paying attention to the last year or two at Google. Google Apps for Email anyone? It’s not free anymore. But let’s not belabor the I-told-you-so part and get to the meat of the post.

    Tiny Tiny RSS

    So installing this is really easy for anyone who’s installed any PHP/SQL app before, I’m not going to get into that, you can read the Install Notes yourself. What I will point out are the plugins I find most useful, and the quirks to keep in mind.

    First of all, ttrss is more like MediaWiki than WordPress. This means the upgrade is mostly manual for some of us, and you activate plugins by editing the config.php file. However. There is also a plugin interface in settings, so the define’d plugins are basically like Network Activated, which is great if you have multiple users. The other plugins are in the preferences.

    Plugins work like this:

    define('PLUGINS', 'auth_internal, digest, updater');

    And I am fond of the following:

    • auth_internal – Authenticates against internal tt-rss database
    • digest – Digest mode for tt-rss (tablet friendly UI) Turn this on if you use your iPad
    • updater – Updates tt-rss installation to latest version.

    Interestingly, I cannot run the web-updater from my server, and it’s certainly to do with my PHP settings. That said, the manual upgrade is like WP: upload files, refresh DB, drink beer. I don’t mind it at all. There are the other available plugins under Preferences -> Plugins, and they make a lot of sense just by looking at them. Obviously they’re easy to see based on what you’d want to use. There’s no Twitter Plugin since Twitter’s new API made it a hassle to tweet and I don’t blame them on this front.(Tangental: Speaking of asinine moves, Twitter’s new API may require us to use it to embed tweets. The answer to the direct question was predictably vague.)

    But if you’re here today, you probably want a more Google Reader type experience. I would enable ‘Combined Feed Display’ under preferences and disable ‘Automatically expand articles in combined mode’. This will bring the ability to expand posts. It doesn’t collapse them quite right or at all via mouse, HOWEVER everything you want can be done via key commands.

    • s – Mark an article as starred.
    • n (or down-arrow) – go to the next article
    • p (or up-arrow) – go to the next article
    • u – toggle read/unread

    That’s pretty much all I needed, and once I read them, they were blindingly obvious. You can see them when you’re

    You can style CSS to fiddle with the layout, but so far I’ve not figured out how to make it display the title of the feed.

    greader feeds

    versus

    Screen Shot 2013-03-14 at 11.54.09 AM

    On the other hand, I know the favicons of most of these sites so with a little CSS jiggering I was able to make it look a little better for myself. Here’s my CSS:

    div.postReply div.postContent, body#ttrssMain, body#ttrssPrefs, body#ttrssLogin, body,blockquote,#content-insert blockquote, #headlines-frame blockquote, .dijitContentPane blockquote  { font-size:14px;}
div.postReply div.postHeader { font-weight:bold;font-size:14px;}
.hlScorePic {display:none;}
img.tinyFeedIcon {float:left;}
.Unread span.titleWrap  { font-weight:bold; }

    From there on out, you can play with design as you like it. It’s clean, it’s simple, and best of all, it’s Open Source so if you like most of it, you can fork the rest!

  • Tiny Tiny RSS

    Tiny Tiny RSS

    Tiny Hippo Had a Tiny Train
    Credit: Poorly Drawn Lines
    The majority of my ‘I am going to learn this if it kills me!’ lessons come from when I’m just dead frustrated with a product. Today it’s Google Reader.

    I like RSS feeds. They work well for me, I like having them sitting there, waiting for me to pay attention. It keeps news out of my email (which is for communication) and makes sure even if I miss a tweet, I see the article later. The world comes to me. This is also a part of my evil ploy to keep myself at Inbox Zero (current status – Inbox has 7 emails at home, 11 at work). I only leave emails in my queue when I know I need to hang on to them for a good reason, and even then I’m likely to save them off line (I use IMAP) to keep anything long term.

    For the last few years I’ve been using Google Reader because I check my RSS feeds at work (Windows XP, still) and home (Mac), and it lets me sync between the two. Google Reader remembers what I’ve read, and I don’t have to re-read things. But recently Google screwed me over, hard, with their inability to update feeds in anything resembling realtime. Specifically, all my WordPress.org feeds were days, if not weeks behind, and I couldn’t force them to update! What was going on?

    At first I thought it had to do with WP’s recent(ish) server upgrade to nginx, as certainly the problem started around that time, so I asked Otto and Nacin if there was a thing going on. Otto replied that there was, but it was Google. See, Google uses PubSubHubbub, which allows for updates in near-real-time. Sounds cool. If it worked. Now before you say it’s clearly me having the problem, it’s not. I asked around, and everyone who monitors WordPress.org related feeds with Google Reader has agreed: the feeds ain’t in real time anymore.

    I switched to another feed reader and, lo and behold, it worked just fine. Well that sucks. Now how can I handle all this? I could use a dedicated feed reader, but then I’m stuck only reading on one computer, which I certainly could do, but it’s 2012, and I like portability. What sort of options am I left with? After two weeks of experimenting and testing with various web-based readers, I decided that Google really was the best of them, and I was depressed. But I wasn’t defeated. I knew, I just knew, that some clever soul felt my pain and wanted to help me out. And I was right.

    Enter Tiny Tiny RSS. Tiny Tiny RSS is an open source web-based news feed (RSS/Atom) reader and aggregator, designed to allow you to read news from any location, while feeling as close to a real desktop application as possible.

    Tiny Tiny RSS

    Update daemon is not running.On the grand scheme of things, it’s easier to set up than RSS2Email (which I use on another account on this server), but due to me being on CentOS, which doesn’t really daemonize well for users, I had to cron job my feed updates at first. I set it at 15 minutes, after I ran it manually a few times to catch up. There are a few ‘quirks’ that aren’t as nice as Google reader. Like I have to manually refresh the back to get the read/unread counts to work right, and even with define('ENABLE_UPDATE_DAEMON', false); set, it keeps telling me that the update daemon is off. Turns out I also had to delete the /lock/update_daemon.lock file.

    Meanwhile, I dug further into this and found the pretty easy setup for ‘screen’:

    $ cd /public_html/tt-rss
$ screen -S updaterss
$ php ./update.php -daemon

    And detach from the screen with CTRL+A+D shortcut. Now someone mentioned that this will ‘break’ if the server is rebooted, so I left my cron job running just in case. I’m happy with cron, if it comes down to brass knuckles.

    I’m happy with this, and it’s only been a couple hours. The actually install process was easy, but this isn’t something I’d suggest if you’re the sort who wants a lot of help and hand holding for an app. I’m monitoring my CPU/memory consumption right now, but it seems pretty minimal, so I’m really pleased I have an alternative I like. My wish list is insanely small:

    1. A ‘click to refresh all feeds’ button, instead of relying on cron/command line(I could probably code this myself, just haven’t yet)
    2. Auto-refresh of the page resets the read/unread counts correctly

    And the ‘fix’ for now for those is cron/cli and refresh the page. So I’ll live, quite happily.

    Tiny Tiny RSS lives at http://tt-rss.org but they’re also on GitHub.

  • Make An RSS Powered Email List

    Make An RSS Powered Email List

    Sometimes the problems we have are insanely more complicated than they should be, because our heads get trapped in a space they shouldn’t be. For years, I used FeedBurner to manage my RSS feeds. Then I realized I didn’t care that much, I didn’t need to know who was accessing my feeds, and really the only benefit was that I could put ads in my feeds (which … no one clicked on anyway) and 12 people could subscribe via email. Well, with some research I found that I could put ads in my feeds with some WordPress functions (I’ve since removed them) and I could use Subscribe2 as a plugin to email when I had new posts. Don’t get me wrong, I really like Subscribe2 except I didn’t like the interface. It’s on the back end of WordPress. My site is a BuddyPress site. Everything is on the front end for my users, and I like it that way. It all looks ‘branded.’ The plugin dev was, fairly, under the idea of ‘Works how I want it.’ I thought about forking, but as I looked at the code, I thought that I really didn’t need WordPress to handle this. I needed a way to email an RSS feed to a mailing list. A proper, opt-in, stable, mailing list, that wouldn’t affect my blog while processing.

    I found an answer that can be applied to any site, WordPress or not.

    What?

    The problem:
    I have an RSS feed I want to be able to email to people who don’t like RSS, and I don’t want to use FeedBurner, MailChimp or any external process.

    The solution:

    • Setup a MailMan list for your emails and configure as needed
    • Install and configure rss2email
    • Setup a cron job

    Why?

    Why not use [this product]? When I presented this to people the first thing they said was ‘Just use FeedBurner!’ or ‘Use MailChimp!’ I get that I can use those third-party vendors, but I don’t want to. I like to self-host because then, if things go wrong, I have the ability to do something about it. This is also how I increase my IT toolkit. I have a need, I find a solution. Sometimes I write the code, and sometimes I just master a new tool.

    Why Mailman? Mailman (or properly GNU Mailman) is installed on my server and while it may be old, the current stable version is 2.1.14, and that came out September 2010. It’s still updated, maintained and supported. And it works. I’m familiar with it, I’m comfortable with it, and there’s no reason not to. I did experiment with phpList, which claims to be able to handle RSS feeds as ‘source’ on it’s own. The problem, as my Twitter buddy @JohnPBloch warned me, is it’s not friendly. He said “I don’t care much for phpList. I always felt like the software was working against me instead of with me.” And he’s right. It took 5 minutes of setup for me to gag and delete it.

    Why rss2email? I don’t think RSS is dead. In fact, I still prefer it to email (or Twitter). My unread RSS list (currently run via Google Reader) sits, quietly, patiently, waiting my attention. I don’t get spam or junk feeds, and if I decided to mark all my Fail Blog feeds as read without reading them, no one knows but me. I don’t have to reply to anything, and I can go back to using my email for communication. That said, I know a lot of people who like to get updates in their email, so I have to take that into consideration when running a site. Sometimes, when you make a site, you cater to yourself. Sometimes you cater to your audience.

    Why cron? I’m on Linux. That’s what you do when you want to schedule things.

    How?

    Bear in mind that my details are going to be specific to my situation.

    Mailman is the easiest. You make a mailing list. I wanted an announcement mailing list, so under Privacy options -> Sender Filters I set up that all users were moderated by default and to discard their emails. Then added my email under “List of non-member addresses whose postings should be automatically accepted.” I knew I was going to have emails sent from a specific address, and I didn’t want that address to GET the emails, so by putting it on that list, I don’t have to worry about approving posts. That’s pretty much all the ‘special’ customization I did. If I’d wanted to put a reject to other people’s emails to the list, instead of a discard, I’d have added this “This is an announcement only list. Your post has been rejected.”

    rss2email was the hardest, but only because it was new. The install process is really straightforward. I made very minor tweaks to the config.py file, based on a first run when I realized that my mailing list would strip HTML. I set HTML_EMAIL and USE_CSS_STYLING to 0 to get it all to plain text. I changed my DEFAULT_FROM and OVERRIDE_FROM to ‘pretty’ versions of my domain information. Then I had to customize my SMTP stuff, since it requires authentication and is on a special port (not 25).

    cron was the most surprising. Since I have to run rss2email out of the same folder it’s in (Python…) I wrote a quick shell script called rss2email.sh that has two steps. It changes directory to my install of rss2email and then it calls the command ./r2e run. Then I called it with a twice-daily (0 and 12) cron job with /home/USERNAME/rss2email.sh and it’s done. I’m not going to give you a blow by detail on how to do cron stuff. It’s way too complicated to try and overview here.

    Satisfied?

    Pretty well. I’m still massaging the output a bit. The HTML output of a full RSS entry was weird. After changing my WordPress feed to excerpts, I ended up with some weird lines in my emails:

    This was caused by some old functions I had in my theme to insert ads into my feeds (mentioned above). I took that out, called ./r2e reset to clean out the database, and then re-ran the script. Worked fine! I admit, I had some moments where I didn’t like putting the excerpt in. I use a custom crafted excerpt in every single post on this site as part of my layout, and while I prefer to avoid ‘read more!’ type things in my feeds, I realized my custom excerpts would be ‘good enough’ for anyone who cared. I do wish WordPress would make two feeds, one excerpt and one none, but that’s a job for another day. At least I’ve managed to semi-customize my Mailman digest header (via manually editing masthead.txt).

    After all my testing, I deleted the mailing list and reset everything, did a clean build, and voila! Works like a champ, without putting extra stress on things!