Bad news, Google is sending Google Reader to its grave. So I’ve been looking for a decent replacement. After scanning the internet I’ve decided to try Tiny Tiny RSS. So far I’m quite happy with it, especially after replacing its iPhone-oriented mobile version with this. Tiny Tiny RSS looks and works quite similar to Google Reader and I know that my own web server wont be going down anytime soon.
Installing Tiny Tiny RSS
Installing Tiny Tiny RSS is a very simple process consisting of these steps:
- Download and unpack Tiny Tiny RSS
- Setup a database and a Tiny Tiny RSS database user (dont use your database root user!)
- Configure Tiny Tiny RSS
- (optional) replace the mobile interface with Mobile version using jQuery mobile by Matthieu Boinet.
Download and unpack
Download and unpack Tiny Tiny RSS from the project page, the download link is at the bottom of the page. Once downloaded, unpack the archive in your web directory myhost$> tar -xvzf 1.7.3.tar.gz
After you have unpacked the archive, make sure that the directories chache, lock and feed-icons and their subdirectories are writable by the web server user. myhost$> chown -R www-data:www-data cache lock feed-icons
Replace www-data with the user that is used by your linux distibution.
Setup database and database user
I will be using MySQL as the database backend, and used the following steps to create the database for Tiny Tiny RSS and a specific database user that will be used. Using the MySQL shell enter the following queries:mysql> CREATE DATABASE ttrssdb;
mysql> GRANT alter,create,delete,drop,insert,index,update,select ON ttrssdb.* TO ttrssuser IDENTIFIED BY SecretPassword;
mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
Replace “SecretPassword” with a password of your choice. After the basic database setup the database needs to be populated using the bundled sql-file:mysql -u ttrssuser -D ttrssdb -p < schema/ttrss_schema_mysql.sql
Configure Tiny Tiny RSS
The last step in the basic setup is to configure Tiny Tiny RSS. Simply copy/rename config file config.php-dist to config.php. Open config.php in your editor of choice and fill in the parameters for DB_TYPE, DB_USER, DB_NAME, DB_PASS, SELF_URL_PATH. To be sure, confirm that the other options in the file are correct.
Test run
You should now be able to test the installation using your browser. Login with using the username “admin” and password “password” and make sure you change the password to something more secure.
Replace the mobile interface
The default mobile interface is deprecated (and looks like a rather ugly iPhone-thingy) I used a replacement interface that uses the external API (make sure to enable it for you user in the preferences). Download the replacement here. Unpack into your Tiny Tiny RSS directory. To replace the existing mobile interface, simply replace the old mobile directory with the directory created by unpacking ttrss-mobile. In my case I renamed the old mobile directory and made a symbolic link to the ttrss-mobile directory. Create another symbolic link for /mobile/index.php to ttrss-mobile/index.html. And finally edit the ttrss-mobile configuration file (conf.js). Its only two entries where you specify the relative URLs for the mobile interface and your Tiny Tiny RSS installation.
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