RSS Feed Readers Part I - FreshRSS

I’ve recently been playing around with feedreaders, and how I get my data from the web. I was previously using Feedly, but then decided I didn’t want to share my data with them (linked to Facebook account). I then signed up for thefeedreader.com which is decent, but not exactly what I was after. So I thought I’d try out a couple of alternatives.

The first one I tried was FreshRSS which is a web based reader, though a self hosted solution. It was between this and TinyTinyRSS, but I decided to go with this one as it could be setup using a SQLIte Db rather than MySQL - I thought it would be easier for my Raspbery Pi to handle.

Setup

I previously had lighttpd installed on the Pi but after reading about it being buggy, I decided to remove and install nginx instead. I more or less followed this guide to install, though did hit upon an issue in that the PHP components were version 7.0 instead of 5 (just replaced 5 with 7.0 in the commands).

After setting up, the FreshRSS install didn’t go as planned as it stated I was missing libraries to process XML and DOM. This was especially annoying as it didn’t tell me what was missing. I was trying to instal libxml2 but that didn’t work and the PHP website wasn’t much use either. I randomly stumbled across a site that mentioned installing php7.0-xml and so I tried that - it worked!

I added some feeds and it looked like this:

Hacking About

Everything was grand, almost. I didn’t like the way it was handelling my twitter feeds. They were truncated and I decided I wanted to click on a link and get taken to that users page - so I could read all the new tweets at once. I played around with writing a plug-in, though later found out it didn’t work as the links in the feed were potentially another users (if it was a Re-Tweet). In case it’s of any use, this is sort of what I had:

class TwitterLinksExtension extends Minz_Extension {
	public function init() {
		//$this->registerHook('entry_before_insert', array($this, 'transformLink'));

		// Use this one for debug.  Doesn't store in Db
		$this->registerHook('entry_before_display', array($this, 'transformLink'));
	}

	public function transformLink($entry) {
		// $entry is FreshRSS_Entry objecy
		// Accessible fields:
		// title, author, content, link, date, is_read, is_favourite, feed

		$link = $entry->link();

		// Only apply this stuff two twitter feed items
		 if (false === strpos($link, 'twitter.com')) {
			return $entry;
		}

		// Store the content
		$content = $entry->content();

		// Get the link the the users page
		// Note author contains re-tweeters name, not the user I'm following
		// Don't work for retweets as has retweeter.
		$pos = strpos($link,'/', 20);
		$timelineLink = substr($link, 0, $pos);
		$entry->_content(sprintf('%s <p>Link %s</p>', $content, $entry->feed()));
		return $entry;
	}
}

Plan B involved hacking around the helper files (app/views/helpers/index/normal/entry_header.phtml) to change the links with a bit of php. Not very nice really, but got the job done - I’m sure there’s an alternative that’s better, but difficult with to lack of documentation etc.

Overall, the program seemed good and I liked the clean look. There were a few negatives though, so I’ll be back with a part II. To summarise my thoughts on this feed reader:

Pros

• Nice clean interface
• Not depending on 3rd parties.
• Can modify it, but not super easy (See code above)

Cons

• Not much documentation. Code is well commented but IN FRENCH. Harder for me to hack about with.
• I’m not familiar with MVC / PHP anymore. Mixture of html/PHP looks like a dogs dinner.
• Do I want to keep my Raspberry Pi turned on all the time?? Thought about Rsyncing the Db with my linux machine as could then hand off Db.
• Not all links work well with vimprenator (or Tridactyl, it’s replacement). This is a big -ve.

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