Big IDEA

DIY web-based aggregators

22 June 2006

I have been thinking about moving my subscriptions to a web-based aggregator, but I’m too cheap to join FeedLounge and too impatient for Bloglines. I poked around a bit and found three host-it-yourself web-based aggregators that can give me what I’m after: speed.

Tiny Tiny RSS is the leader right now for a private reader–there’s absolutely nothing social about it in the single-user mode as far as I can tell. In fact, you even have to log in to read your feeds. The great thing about TT-RSS is that it is fast. You click to expand/hide an item and Bam! there it is (or isn’t). The problem with TT-RSS is that if you’re using PHP5, the OPML import won’t work. Even using the workarounds listed in the FAQ I couldn’t get it to work. Oh well, it might still be worth the effort to manually enter my subscriptions.

TT-RSS has a couple of features that make it a likely candidate for my use: stars and read/unread status. Stars work much like gmail’s stars–starring an item adds it to a special star folder. I assume this is akin to saving a post. Tracking read/unread status is a must for me, and luckily there is an option to select all|read|unread and toggle the read status.

TT-RSS also has a multi-user mode. It seems that it relies on the admin to create user accounts–there is no registration page–but once users are registered, you can browse their feeds. It looks like you can choose not to share on a per-feed basis by specifying a “hide from feed browser” option.

An experimental feature that I haven’t played with yet is labels, that is, “Experimental support for virtual feeds based on user crafted SQL queries.”

TT-RSS requires MySQL 4.1+, php, and MagpieRSS.

Lilina is another simple aggregator. It does not keep track of read/unread items, nor is it for multiple users. However, if you just want to throw up a bunch of feeds and let people view them quickly and easily, it looks like a great little app for that. Lilina does let you select the currency of items to read: the last 24 hours, the last 48 hours, the last week, or all available. It also uses MagpieRSS.

The last aggregator I looked at was Zort, and it’s one of my favorites for sheer simplicity. Like Lilina, Zort doesn’t offer any tracking or starring of items, it just aggregates feeds and displays them. Surprise, it uses MagpieRSS, too.

Adding feeds to Zort requires you to edit a config file. It allows for different categories and pages. Again, for throwing out some aggregated content, Zort is really quick and simple to set up. Here’s an example I put together in 5 minutes.