Previously, I voiced my unpleasantness about Google discontinuing Reader.

Several of you who commented on that post offered alternative rss feed reader suggestions, as did several tech blogs I follow. The end of one particular tech article caught my eye. It was about creating my own syncing RSS reader.

Hmm.

Since I’m more a hands-on kind of guy, I started researching what it would take to host my own RSS reader.

And what do you know, there’s a project called Tiny Tiny RSS that is just that!

And thanks to a conveniently timed post on Lifehacker, I didn’t have to wade through it on my own. Kind of. Someone was nice enough to have documented how to do it.

Which I followed.

And now I have my own syncing RSS reader hosted on my own webserver! No more Google or any other third-party company to change their mind on discontinuing another piece of software I use.

Sadly, there is not a native iOS app. Yet. (There is an Android app.) But I’m betting that will change soon, especially with Google Reader being forcibly retired. And if not, I may just delve into learning how to create an iOS app and do it myself.

In the meantime, I can read it through Safari via iOS just fine with the help of a plugin in called “ttrss-mobile“. It works better than a couple of the apps I was using before, and I don’t have the weird switch over to Safari that I had to do to comment on some of the blogs I read. I did have to do a little odd configuration change to make it work properly. But that’s because I set up Tiny Tiny RSS a little… oddly. It’s how I do.

For tablet users, the native digest mode works well on my iPad. Once it was enabled, that is.

Hopefully this information will help some of you who are also experiencing the sadness of what will be the loss of Google Reader.

And as an added bonus, now I don’t need two separate apps to sort my regular RSS feed from the porn RSS feed. 😉