After the great Google Reader shutdown of 2013 I switched my feed reading to a self-hosted instance of Fever and I've been a happy user ever since. I didn't mind that it wasn't open source, I was glad to spend the money to support a developer building a great product. Sadly now that support and developed has ended. I'd like to thank Shaun Inman for a great product. The end of development and support for Fever don't necessarily mean that it will stop working at any time in the near future. But I took this as an opportunity to look around at the state of the RSS reader world and see if there isn't a better tool for me to use now and for the future.

My requirements are simple. It must run on a server that I control, be accessible using a reasonably modern web browser and support import and export of feed listings via OPML. Theere are bonus marks if the Fever API is supported (I've got Reeder running on my iPad) and for ease of installation and use. I'm not a sophisticated feed reader but I've accumulated quite a collection of sites that I follow over the years. Fever is currently following 370 feeds but I can use any transition as an opportunity to trim away the dead wood.

After a little research and with some help from OpenSource.com I narrowed my search to three possible solutions: selfoss, miniflux and Tiny Tiny RSS

My evaluation strategy was pretty simple - install the tool on an Ubuntu virtual machine and if it looks promising do a fresh install on my web server and try the tool for size for a few days.

Selfoss

This topped a few of the searches I did and was the first solution I installed. Well, I say that but I haven't managed to install it on my VM. I got to the stage of posting to the forum asking about error messages that reported missing PHP .so files before I gave up. In this particular case it looks to me like the install expected PHP 5 but on the Ubuntu 16.04 the default is PHP 7. I may be wrong, I'm certainly no PHP guru, but clear installation requirements and instructions are nice. I may revisit selfoss again and see if I can't get over my installation problems.

Miniflux

Miniflux takes the river of news approach and applies it to a minimalist presentation. Installation was fairly straight forward and I managed to import my feed collection quite quickly. The folder structure that I had set up in Fever didn't make the transition - it isn't part of the OPML contents - so I took the opportunity to trim my feed list and put them into a small number of groups.

Updating the feeds is simple in the web UI - just press the 'refresh all' link on the subscriptions page. Then go to the 'unread' page and scroll through the articles. There are some nice simple keyboard shortcuts to aid navigation and reading.

There are 2 puzzles I still haven't cracked with Miniflux. I can't get the automated feed refresh working - probably something to do with the way I have set up PHP - and I still haven't found out what the 'groups' are used for. Apart from this minor quirks I am liking the philosophy and execution of miniflux and I think it's going to be my feed reader from now on.

Tiny Tiny RSS

Tiny Tiny RSS has been around for a few years and receives rave reviews on the web. Installation on my virtual machine was pretty straight forward and I had it up and running without any problems. The interface is more complex than Miniflux, and even than Fever, with nested folders of feeds and a nice display of each article.

Where I struggled with Tiny Tiny RSS was refreshing the feeds. The documentation says that this is best done via a cron job but I couldn't get the command working. I'm also not mad keen on running a PostgreSQL server on my web host as I'm not knowledgeable enough to keep it running securely.

So for the time being I'm going with Miniflux