Newsblur : a good substitute to Google Reader ?

[barijaona]

In an ideal world, all services would implement the Google Reader API. https://github.com/ViennaRSS/vienna-rss/issues/160

But we are not in an ideal world. The July 1st deadline is just 3 months ahead, and while almost everyone is rushing to implement the Google Reader API, we haven't seen yet an implementation that we can beta-test with Vienna.
And I doubt that it is anyone's priority to support non paying users who would access their servers with ad-free RSS clients.
So, this being the Easter week-end, I considered other manners of resurrecting feeds syncing… ;-)

For my personal use, I installed a copy of Tiny Tiny RSS. Not very difficult, but definitely not for the average Vienna user.
Tiny Tiny RSS has an API, but apparently, a single Androïd client uses it. There is a "digest" plugin and a web app for smartphones who can decently handle iPad and iPhone though.
Implementing Tiny Tiny RSS support in Vienna seems feasible, but there are a few fundamental differences between its API and Google's.

I then searched other APIs we could consider. I found Feedmin, then Fever and wondered : would Vienna users fork money to access these services ?

And it came to my mind that I don't like that all these APIs use internal ID numbers to reference feeds and articles. It is a potential source of problems when you decide to switch to another service.

I then rediscovered the NewsBlur API, and found out that it has the advantage of referencing articles by their URLs. This is interesting for implementing a lightweight solution, limited to syncing, letting each client fetch articles directly from the original source. À la Brent Simmons.

[url=http:/]Newsblur.com[/url] use is free as far as you don't exceed 68 feeds. This would fit my personal needs : I currently only have 11 feeds that I want to sync with mobile devices ; my other feeds are local to Vienna only. For people wanting to follow more than 68 feeds on the go, 24 US$ a year seems reasonable. If you are tech-savvy, setting up your own installation is perfectly doable : the project is open-source, under a MIT license.

All in all, a good product which seems to be able to attract multiple categories of people. So I consider focusing my efforts on supporting it.

Your thoughts ?

[lboregard]

it may probably come down to supporting multiple apis ?

im also using tiny tiny rss, running on a free heroku instance

im currently using the web interface of ttrss, but would love to browse through Vienna, synced to ttrss

[copsychedelic]

Hello, new Vienna user (great project by the way).

I know Im late for the party but it would be interesting to support something like Tiny Tiny RSS.
I personally don't think it's that hard to install even for the average user (well, I'm not average at all, but still), and there are a couple of services out there offering hosting for Tiny Tiny RSS (but then, I doubt the average Joe Doe would spend the cash instead of just migrating to something like Feedly or maybe using something like Flipboard).

Another player to consider would be Selfoss, but I don't know if they have published an API for consumption or something like that, just throwing it out there.

As far as Newsblur goes... I think I'd rather pay the $5 bucks or so a month for a shared hosting at Hawk Host or something like that (it's hard since all hosting companies seem to get the same amount of glossy and terrible reviews), than paying 2 bucks a month to some guys.
As far as usage I might not be the average subscriber. I have around 100 feeds (Im in the process of weeding things out, but still, I doubt it will get down to less than 50-60).

So far Vienna seems amazing (cannot say the same about the outdated yet free Reeder for Mac, which is disastrous) and working fine for Google Reader.

I guess I'm a bit in the other side of the spectrum, but for what it's worth, I felt compelled to reply. I'm not switching to another rss server thingy for the time being, just waiting until we're in mid-June and then all the players are there out in the field so we can have this draft (unlike the people who migrated, maybe in an unnecessary rush the sad day we heard the news).