Google reader RIP Welcome TheOldReader

Remember the old time when you had the google reader to read you news, or using this for synchronizing reading between different systems. I was using it untill it closed down in july 2013. After that i was using the akregator app on my linux laptop to read my news in the morning

This was working well, untill last weekend when i did forget to bring the power suply for my laptop with me. So I was without my laptop ovwe the weekend. An interesting experience in all. But this lead to discoveries of what I could not do well on my ipad.

So in the “Good old days” I was using Google Reader to sync between my laptop and my ipad. But that has not worked since the reader when down so I was only reading new in the laptop. But now I was kind of forced to use the ipad for it. So how do you read news on both the laptop and ipad and keep them both in sync.

Well there is a service out there called TheOldReader. This serice is more or less a replacement for the google reader. It has a website front end as well as an API that a lot of applications can use and there is RSS readers on IOS, Android and Linux and others that supports it.

History if TheOldReader

The Old Reader started as a hobby project by 3 programers and was upp and running with about 10k users before Google said thay where closing down Google Reader (March 2013) and when the google reader was down, in august 2013, it had exploded to more than 420k users with as much new users as 60k in one day, there where into serious problems. They even talked about closing down the services as it was to sucessfull.

In november 2013 it was announced that Levee Labs in United States was taking it over and would continue the service. The new team invested in hardware upgradesm new hosting providers and implemented new features. To continue the addfree operations, they indroduced a premium service.

Im am paying for the premium service just to suport them. The basic service that gives 100 feeds are quite enogth for me, but supporting them with 25$ per year is probably a good idea.

Apps for ios

There are a number of apps for the API. I did test some, but the best one i found i feeddler. There are a free one that has some adds, and there is also a pro version (for 4.99$) that is without adds.

Its a nice app, clean interface. As it uses the API from TheOldReader, it will keep my other readers in sync.

There are other apps that you could try for the ios. On the APPS page at TheOldReader there are a few:

  • Reeder for IOS
  • Readery
  • Feedoo

Apps for linux

For linux there are not that many apps that works. The one i did find is liferea. Its a nice RSS reader that has support for theOldReader API.

So i installed it from the standard repositories with

Fired it up and added my theOldReader account and i was up and running. Yes I did export my old subscriptions to an opml file and imported it all to my theOldReader account on their website.

It works but there are problems. The grouping into categories works in theOldReaders webbinterface but is lost in the liferea app. Not optimal. So I start to goole and find that the version that is in the repository is a bit old and in newer versions of liferea this is fixed.

So i contine to see if there is someone out there that has a newer buil, and there is. Panda Jim’s Liferea unstable repository. This has version 1.11 and should work. So I added the repository with

then do and update with

and then install liferea with

i did get into a bit of problems as I forgot to remove the old version so I had to do a bit of extra command

and now when i start it and import my theOldReader setting it works, and i have all my categories.

Installing taskbar plugin

When I start up liferea it did not show up in the taskbar, but after checking around a bit I found out that there are plugins and one that should do the trick is “Tray Icon (GNOME Classic)” so I when into

tools->preserences->plugins

and enabled the Tray Icon plugin and now I have a nice tray icon also.

Autostart for liferea

I cant get liferea to autostart out of the box. Akregator, the old RRS reader i was using just started up if I had it in the tasj bar. But liferea will not do that. So i hade to build an autostart script for it.

So go into $HOME/.kde/Autostart and create a file named liferea.sh with the content

That should take care of the autostart

Downside

There are onlu 2 downsides to liferea as faar as I can see. The first one is that it dont remember its screen position, so when you po ip up it allways start up at the same place. And that you dont have a setting that will close it down to the taskbar insted of just closing it down.

I have a number of times closed it down by misstake.

But thats the only 2 small things i dont like.

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