I don't really want a reader, I want a service that syncs state accross readers, and aggregates my feeds into one feed for easy downloads by devices.<p>Google reader was perfect for that, and it was only on occasion that I used their web interface. Most of the time I was on my iPad/iPhone/Android (using Reeder/Byline/Flipboard and the official android client)
The death of Google Reader might actually be a good thing, in the long run.<p>Google giving away their product for free effectively prevented a working market - nobody could make money selling a feed-aggregator.<p>With Google out of the way, there will hopefully be money sloshing around, and users who now realise how much they want this kind of service (and are prepared to pay for it).
I use Newsbeuter[1] in a Linux terminal.<p>It's not a GUI app or web-based, which are both plusses to me. It's also neither closed-source, nor spyware (like way too many web-based readers are).<p>Newsbeuter is relatively feature rich and has a decent enough interface. I'm pretty happy with it, and prefer it to the closest Linux terminal RSS reader competitor that I've found, Snownews.[2]<p>The main problems with it is that when feeds get large (1000+ articles), reading that feed gets to be pretty slow. This is a long-standing performance bug that has not been fixed in years. But, apart from that, if you're reading feeds with a reasonable number of article in them, it's great.<p>[1] - <a href="http://www.newsbeuter.org/index.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.newsbeuter.org/index.html</a><p>[2] - <a href="http://snownews.kcore.de/" rel="nofollow">http://snownews.kcore.de/</a>
No one mentioned Gregarius yet : <a href="https://sourceforge.net/projects/gregarius/" rel="nofollow">https://sourceforge.net/projects/gregarius/</a> : it is a fine self-hosted web-based alternative to Google Reader. There has been no project activity lately but the software works just fine, I have been using it since 2006 - just keep it private for security's sake. It scales well with a lot of feeds.
I think the developers of a couple of the biggest RSS readers should get together and decide on a standard file format to store "metadata" such as read items, starred items, etc.<p>This file could be stored on a server or in a user's Dropbox folder. It would allow users to pick an RSS reader freely (per platform), without losing and rebuilding all their data. It also keeps all this metadata in sync, one less worry for the developers.
No mention of Newsbeuter "The Mutt of RSS readers". Feeds and podcasts all managed in your terminal: <a href="http://www.newsbeuter.org" rel="nofollow">http://www.newsbeuter.org</a>
Since I'm one of those "weekend hackers who likes to use PHP like a newb"......<p>I use a self hosted and rather hacked up rnews install: <a href="http://rnews.sourceforge.net/" rel="nofollow">http://rnews.sourceforge.net/</a><p>It uses magpierss to grab feeds: <a href="http://magpierss.sourceforge.net/" rel="nofollow">http://magpierss.sourceforge.net/</a><p>I also make heavy use of yahoo pipes to munge together a few rss feeds and do other regex'y type things to a feeds: <a href="http://pipes.yahoo.com" rel="nofollow">http://pipes.yahoo.com</a> (pls yahoo, never kill pipes!)<p>The reason I like rnews is the boxed layout (where each feed is seperated), rather than every other rss reader which jams everything into a single feed. With the boxed way I have the feeds I read daily up top and then progressively have boxes for sites which I only skim headlines for every week down lower.<p>I have a side question which I've been meaning to float on HN for some time: is there anything cool I could do with the fact that my self hosted rss aggregator receives roughly 2,000 hits a day from search bots? I mean I get scraped constantly all day, from ALL engines.
Dude forgot <a href="http://skimfeed.com" rel="nofollow">http://skimfeed.com</a>. Guess it's not 3.0 enough. Recommendation engine kicks in around 5 clicks, go easy on her.
There is also no mention of Tiny Tiny RSS or RSS Lounge, which are both good RSS readers that you can self-host pretty easily (FOSS webapps).<p>Pretty surprising.
Sigh, I actually started building a RSS reader for fun five days ago. Now Google Reader is shutting down, and it seems like everyone is starting to build one.
Why is it that so many of these alternatives are hosted web apps? Isn't the lesson to learn from Google Reader going away that you might not want to trust hosted web apps for the long term? Why aren't there more client-side app alternatives?
I stopped using Google Reader and RSS feeds a long time ago without actually intending on doing so. I just started finding so much stuff to read through Facebook, Twitter and Hacker News that I totally forgot about RSS.<p>That being said, I did make a simple ruby script to email me articles when an RSS feed gets updated. I did this mainly to help me keep tabs on service availability RSS feeds, i.e. Twitter's status RSS, Facebook's status RSS, Amazon AWS stratus RSS, and my local weather advisory RSS. It comes in very handy. Maybe I'll put the script on GitHub.
Most clientside newsreaders simply do not scale, several thousand feeds make them die. Also you want to have your rss catcher always online, so a server is a better choice - but many FOSS serverside readers are also poorly implemented, slow, missing features, bad design.<p>Also the extremely annoying variability of rss feeds is still not handled by many rss parsers, especially the php world misses on this. python ok with feed parser.<p>One more thing: waste of energy duplicating rss feeds a zillion times - just to be deleted in most cases.<p>Seems to be a good usecase for a cool pyramid app on a deduplicating filesystem - what are your plans for the weekend?
Google Reader shutting down at least gives me a new hobby project to hack on. There are a few decent alternatives in this list, but nothing I'm particularly enthusiastic about.
Does anyone here primarily read their RSS feeds "river of news" style (e.g., <a href="http://tabs.mediahackers.org/" rel="nofollow">http://tabs.mediahackers.org/</a>) instead of "mailbox" style (with unread counts)? If so, what do you recommend?<p>So far I'm thinking of using a river for my "firehose" feeds while using newsblur (or something) to keep tabs on my "must read" feeds.<p>I played around with Dave Winer's OPML Editor/River2 but it just never clicked for me.
Do you want a personalized RSS reader plus more? NOOWIT (<a href="http://www.noowit.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.noowit.com</a>) enters private beta in a few days!
It's early, but something we're working on with memamsa[1] is a way to keep up to date on your favorite topics using different types of sources: RSS/Atom, Twitter users/lists, and Hacker News. Combining the best of the traditonal (RSS) and modern sources of links.<p>[1] - <a href="http://memamsa.com/start/gr" rel="nofollow">http://memamsa.com/start/gr</a>
it will be hard to beat google reader in terms of multiple platform support. I dearly love my android google reader app that lets me load items, view them offline, sync them when i get back online.<p>i'm really very sad right now.
I have always use the Firefox Addon Sage <a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/sage/" rel="nofollow">https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/sage/</a>