Donnerstag, 21. März 2013

Replace Google Reader with Tiny Tiny RSS

Google Reader was an essential part of my workflow for keeping up with the literature. I had configured several PubMed-searches as RSS-Feeds. For example, I created an automated search for olf*. Hence, every time a new article appeared on pubmed that contained that term, it would appear in my Google Reader. That was extremely convenient, as I could simply log in to Google Reader whenever I felt like reading new stuff, then browse the RSS with the pubmed query, star interesting abstracts, download those articles and push them to my cloud storage where I keep the PDFs. 
Now Google announced to shut down the Reader Service. Booooooh, bad Google! However, I can't afford to let the decision of some internet company disrupt my workflow ;) So I looked for alternatives, and found Tiny Tiny RSS. TT-RSS is a server-side application to be installed on some webserver. It provides similar service as Google Reader, and even an Android client!
It took me two hours to set it all up, including dusting off my Mysql knowledge and learning how to use systemd. I got along mostly with the install instructions from the TT-RSS website. The only thing which took some time was figuring out how to set up a MySQL database for ttrss, and configuring systemd to run the update daemon. In the end it was pretty straightforward. 

Now my workflow's saved! Happy! ;) 


Note to self: Here's the systemd-service file that is required to start the update daemon for ttrss. To enable it, store it at /lib/systemd/system/ttrss-update.service, and enable it permanently using systemctl enable ttrss-update.service.

[Unit]
Description=Update daemon for ttrss
After=network.target

[Service]
Type=simple
User=wwwrun
Group=www
ExecStart=/usr/bin/php /srv/www/htdocs/feeds/update.php --daemon

Restart=always
RestartSec=60

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target


!!! Update!!! (April 12.2013): the script was missing a second hyphen before -update, which caused the update to be run exactly once on startup, and never again. Fixed.

Second Update Oct 30, 2013: Added Restart flag to the service that takes care of firing the update daemon up again if it exits.

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