Perhaps someday he will attempt a book called “Algorithms for the Kitchen.”


Google Reader’s sunset is the dawn of ownCloud News

This post is dedicated to the memory of Aaron Swartz. Among all his contributions towards a more open Internet, Aaron was also one of the creator of RSS 1.0. Thanks, Aaron.

The first news of the day is that the fantastic ownCloud community has released ownCloud Server 5.0.0. Congratulations everyone!

The second news is that Google has decided to power down Google Reader. This is a sad news for the users of the Reader, but it’s a great opportunity for ownCloud! Google Reader will cease to exist on July 1st and their users are looking for alternatives. As you already know if you have been following this blog, in the last year I have been working on an RSS/Atom reader for ownCloud (News app). The project started as a Summer of Code project sponsored by Google itself. Actually, the original idea and most of the design choices were inspired by Google Reader. It couldn’t be otherwise, since I have been a user of that service myself for long time.

In the last August I released an alpha version of the News app, see my previous post. There has been lot of progress since. Bernhard Posselt (Raydiation) ported the app to the new ownCloud app framework and he joined me as co-maintainer of the app. Thanks to his work, the app works much better now, the user interface is faster and the code is more stable and more testable.
In the last KDEPIM sprint in Berlin, I started to write an API so that external clients can synchronize with the app. Many calls are still missing, but it’s a start. Frank Osterfeld is already using this API in an Akonadi resource that interacts with the app and that can be used by Akregator. His code is in the akregator_port branch of kdepim-runtime. If you want to use the resource, you need akregator2 from the akregator_port branch of kdepim.
I am also trying to put up a new GSoC project for a mobile app that interfaces with this API (if you are a student interested in this, please let me know).

The app was not stable enough to be shipped today with ownCloud 5 (yes, remember news number one: oC 5 released today!). We expect to release a stable version of it in less than two months (probably along with some ownCloud 5.X release). Once that will happen, I will write a post on how to migrate from Google Reader. Just to be clear, there is a big difference between ownCloud News and Google Reader. OwnCloud News is open-source (code is released under AGPL) and you can host it on your own server. And if you use KDE, you will be able to use Akregator off-line and still have all your feeds on the cloud. Google Reader will be shut down on July 1st. You will have to make a change anyway, why not making a real change!

We are developing the app in the master branch of the ownCloud apps repository on github. If you want to check the API, refer to the news_ext_api branch instead. We ask for help with testing, developing, documenting. If you have any questions, bug me (zimba12) or Raydiation on #owncloud-dev, Freenode. The more help we get, the earlier we will manage to ship the app.

Google Reader is dead. Long live ownCloud News!

oc_news_ss

Published by cosenal, on March 14th, 2013 at 10:16 am. Filled under: Coding,Uncategorized Tags: , • 58 Comments

58 Responses to “Google Reader’s sunset is the dawn of ownCloud News”

  1. Now THIS is the right answer – a self-hosted RSS web aggregator!

    Way to go.

    Unfortunately I’ve never been at all impressed with OwnCloud; it just doesn’t work very well. I hope your plugin/extension/wwhatever is better!

    Comment by Brandon on March 14, 2013 at 11:39 am



  2. jo man, looking good!
    as a noob kde user who knows nothing about ownCloud but likes open-source, does this mean I’ll be able to log into some website or through akregator and read my feeds (from multiple locations), or will it involve a technically much more complicated procedure?
    cheers,
    avituzzz

    Comment by avituzzz on March 14, 2013 at 11:47 am



  3. I installed News app today after updating OC to new stable version in my raspberrypi and after receiving a mail from google about reader shutdown. I tryed this app a lot of months ago when it was announced. Now it’s absolutely way better. I already love it; sure, it lacks some feature, but seems already rock solid.

    A side note: the readme says to run ‘make deps’ inside coffee folder, but this command fails in raspbian:

    http://paste.chakra-project.org/4188/

    So I tried to compile it on my desktop, Chakra Linux, and then pushed all news folder to raspberry. It worked fine.

    Oh, some requests :P
    - option to list oldest news first
    - (this is hard) download complete article when a feed posts incomplete body.

    Thanks

    Comment by gcala on March 14, 2013 at 11:59 am



  4. Nice to hear it. But I guess the killer feature would be if it would provide an (additional) which would be compatible to the Google reader api. There are so many apps supporting the Google Reader api out there. They would not need to change and so Owncloud cold attract many users.

    Comment by Mark on March 14, 2013 at 12:16 pm



  5. I’m using akregator for like 6 years or even more, I never used google reader. Akregator + owncloud + mobile app, damn, I’m really looking forward to this!

    Comment by Mike on March 14, 2013 at 12:22 pm



  6. I wonder: Would it be possible to add a Google-RSS-Reader-compatible API to ownCloud News? There are tons of apps out there using that API, so this would greatly facilitate doing the switch.

    Comment by Ralf on March 14, 2013 at 12:27 pm



  7. So the reader is ready, but the app isn’t. I couldn’t find any hints about the reader in Owncloud main page (just your blog in the news). It’s part of the main distribution? I’m testing Owncloud in a virtual machine, but I’m using the Mint (Ubuntu? Debian?) package (don’t know the version), and that doesn’t have the reader.

    Comment by Laerte on March 14, 2013 at 12:38 pm



  8. @Brandon: more specifically, what doesn’t work well in ownCloud? If you find issues, please file them here: https://github.com/owncloud/core/issues

    Comment by cosenal on March 14, 2013 at 1:34 pm



  9. @avituzzz: if you use a hosted service, yes, it means you can go to your provider’s website and use it. If you decide to host it yourself, then you will have to install ownCloud first. It’s more technical, but not that complicated. Have a look here: http://owncloud.org/support/install/

    Comment by cosenal on March 14, 2013 at 1:36 pm



  10. @Laerte: “app” and “reader” are the same thing. No, it’s not shipped in the main distribution of owncloud yet, but it’s going to be in the next release.

    Comment by cosenal on March 14, 2013 at 1:38 pm



  11. [...] LINK [...]

    Pingback by ownCloud even better: replacing Google Reader on March 14, 2013 at 3:33 pm



  12. What about categories ?

    Are there categories of RSS feeds as in Google Reader ?

    Comment by FrenchHope on March 14, 2013 at 3:41 pm



  13. @FrenchHope: there are folders, if that’s what you are asking

    Comment by cosenal on March 14, 2013 at 3:55 pm



  14. @gcala: thanks for trying it out! Yes, your second request sounds quite hard to implement…

    Comment by cosenal on March 14, 2013 at 3:57 pm



  15. For anyone looking for something like this that’s a bit more mature but not part of OC to use in the meantime:

    http://tt-rss.org/

    It has an API and a good Android app in the Market, I’ve been using it for a while. I’ll certainly migrate to OC News if it gets stabler and gets a mobile app, though!

    Comment by Adam Williamson on March 14, 2013 at 7:33 pm



  16. slowly but surely, Google is forcing me to drop their services. Thank you Owncloud for existing. This News app is one more big step for me away from Google.

    Comment by italy_portugal on March 14, 2013 at 9:23 pm



  17. This rocks. Slowly but surely OwnCloud is maturing, and this is one feature that may finally bring me fully on board. Especially the mobile app part :-)

    Comment by Kevin on March 14, 2013 at 11:35 pm



  18. I have installed OwnCloud no problems but could you give a hint as to how to install the current version of the News app? Thanks :)

    Comment by Tim on March 15, 2013 at 2:30 am



  19. [...] Abschaltung betroffen sind. Ein Entwickler arbeitet bereits an einer Erweiterung mit dem Namen ownCloud News. [...]

    Pingback by ownCloud 5 veröffentlicht: Neue Oberfläche und bald ein eigener RSS-Reader on March 15, 2013 at 4:35 am



  20. Is there a description of the API somewhere? I read news and blogs in gnus, but would be nice to sync read-marks to owncloud for when I’m on the go.

    Comment by mooch on March 15, 2013 at 5:28 am



  21. @mooch. Not yet, but I am writing one. I will make another post once the API is ready.

    Comment by cosenal on March 15, 2013 at 5:33 am



  22. [...] wurde ownCloud 5 zum Download bereitgestellt und dort zeichnet sich am Horizont bereits eine würdige Alternative ab, die man auch selber betreiben [...]

    Pingback by Google Reader wird zum 1. Juli abgeschaltet on March 15, 2013 at 6:33 am



  23. [...] ownCloud veröffentlicht. Der Entwickler hat in der Zwischenzeit weiter daran gearbeitet und der News Reader läuft nun erheblich besser. Das nennt sich doch gutes Timing! In zirka zwei Monaten wird es eine stabile Version geben, die [...]

    Pingback by ownCloud 5 veröffentlicht, Google Reader Alternative in Arbeit on March 15, 2013 at 8:13 am



  24. I think the killer feature would be – as noted in some comments here – if News supported the Google-Reader-API. I am convinced most RSS-clients will allow to specify the syncing url so you can use them with any service that support this API. Wouldn’t it be great if ownCloud News was compatible with most of the famous RSS-Apps as Reeder on iOS? I think Marco Arment nailed it here: http://www.marco.org/2013/03/14/baby-steps-replacing-google-reader

    Comment by pheraph on March 15, 2013 at 8:47 am



  25. hi pheraph,
    Thanks for the link, great reading! Marco makes this point clear. After many comments asking for the same thing, I am thinking of doing this. At the moment I am discussing it with other people in ownCloud. One problem is that external API should be more or less uniform among ownCloud apps.

    Comment by cosenal on March 15, 2013 at 9:44 am



  26. Superb news.

    My first thought when I heard the news that Google were ending Reader (well my second thought, my first was unprintable) was that this would be a good thing to host on a small server at home (i.e. a Raspberry PI) to get it off the cloud, and was investigating how I could do this when I find that you are already on it :).

    I hope you can find a GSOC participant to take on the mobile app (Android flavor please :))

    Thanks.

    Comment by DAve Shillito on March 15, 2013 at 11:25 am



  27. [...] listed here, sorry! Its RSS/Atom reader application (News app) is not yet ready for prime time. See this article by its founder and lead developer. Here’s a teaser [...]

    Pingback by 9 Google Reader alternatives | Linux-Support.com on March 15, 2013 at 5:00 pm



  28. I am on the process of installing owncloud 5 on Chakra at the moment, when ill finish ill give it a try. What about its current and planned features? Some things that come in mind are save article offline, add article to your owncloud bookmarks, alternative views like grid, text only or web view?
    Greetings & thank you for your work Cosenal :)

    Comment by Kyriakos Brastianos on March 15, 2013 at 5:38 pm



  29. another vote for the API suggestion mentioned in comment 24. i think this would be a great idea! thanks.

    Comment by gt400 on March 16, 2013 at 2:24 am



  30. Another, related idea is enabling OC’s News app to become a feeder for ebook files. For the “read later”, “read offline” and “archive” use cases.

    https://github.com/owncloud/apps/issues/779

    Comment by Cathryne on March 16, 2013 at 3:44 am



  31. [...] Abschal­tung des Google Read­ers dürfte inter­es­sant sein, dass man bei own­Cloud an einem Fee­dreader arbeitet. Im Moment benutze ich da noch TinyTinyRSS — das ist unglaublich mächtig aber auch [...]

    Pingback by Update: Mit ownCloud 5 zur eigenen Cloudzentrale on March 16, 2013 at 10:10 am



  32. I’ve just installed it on my OC5 instance and testing it with my feeds from GReader. It’s working and it’s not bad at all.
    But my big interest is focused on an Android app and a widget for it, since my main usage was the GReader Widget on my tablet.
    Also, a function to share any article to social networks and email, is a must-have requirement for a rss reader, imho.

    Also during the migration I notice many websites use feedproxy.google.it as their rss engine, and I guess this will be phased out too… :-/

    Comment by LoneStar on March 16, 2013 at 11:38 am



  33. I’ve just installed ownCloud 5 and the current “news” app. Unfortunately I cannot “make dep” in the coffee folder. Debian 6 doesn’t have node.js and I’m still researching my options. What do you use this for? Or more precisely: What won’t work without it?

    Comment by Jan on March 16, 2013 at 12:57 pm



  34. @Jan: You need to run make deps only if you are hacking on the app, not if you just want to use/test it.

    Comment by cosenal on March 17, 2013 at 6:23 am



  35. After reading your Article, I’ve started developing an Android Application but I can’t find a solution to communicate with your App. So what I’ve to do to access your api ?

    Comment by Dave on March 17, 2013 at 7:50 am



  36. @Dave: wait that I finish to implement and document it :)

    Comment by cosenal on March 17, 2013 at 7:53 am



  37. Hi,

    just paniced about google reader shutdown and found this.
    OC install just went fine in a couple of minutes, but I could not find how to install the reader app. I’m a user not a coder, so I ask, is it possible from within the admin interface somehow?

    Thanks
    Tom

    Comment by Tom on March 17, 2013 at 12:43 pm



  38. It’s still an alpha version, that’s why you couldn’t find the app in the owncloud package. Here is a 2-line how-to install the app from the code repository:

    Comment by cosenal on March 17, 2013 at 12:55 pm



  39. [...] And then there is the, still in development, promise of a news reader build on top of OwnCloud. [...]

    Pingback by RSS – Selfhosted | dosch on March 17, 2013 at 5:05 pm



  40. [...] Por lo que sabemos, la nueva aplicación de noticias, que comenzó su desarrollo en el mes de Agosto del año pasado, se incluirá de manera definitiva en el lanzamiento de la versión estable 5.1, que se producirá antes del cierre de Google Reader. Esta aplicación de noticias comenzó como proyecto de código de verano patrocinado por la propia Google, inspirándose en la misma aplicación de Google Reader, como así comenta su autor en el blog “Algorithms for the Kitchen”. [...]

    Pingback by OwnCloud tendrá su aplicación alternativa a Google Reader on March 18, 2013 at 7:00 am



  41. @cosenal, to answer your question regarding OwnCloud’s failings, I gave it a good try from 2011 through 2012 and let’s just say that one of my last posts (to the opendesktop.org registered forums that the application used at the time) was titled “1 Year, No Answers?”.

    Those posts have been destroyed, apparently (yay reliance on “the cloud” for long-term retention), but from what I remember there were some significant things missing or malfunctioning with the software. I think some were the complete lack of any real “cloud” resilience or failover instead of it being just another single-instance personal web server, the absence or failure of per-user permissions or sharing, the limited number of available file types, versioning, inoperable WebDAV, and stuff like that… Maybe it’s improved over the last year.

    My take at the time was it was getting a lot of mileage out of having “cloud” in its name while offering VERY little in the way of “cloud computing” advantages or features.

    Too bad, as I had had hoped it would fill a basic need as part of a self-hosted solution in place of commercial services like Google Docs/Apps/Whatever and DropBox et al.

    Comment by Brandon on March 18, 2013 at 11:55 am



  42. [...] den Rücken zu kehren und zu selbstgehosteten Diensten zurück zu kehren. Umso mehr freut es mich zu lesen, dass für OwnCloud ein RSS Reader samt API in den Startlöchern steht und si… arbeitet. Das wird super, denn es fiel mir damals echt schwer von Akregator auf den Google Reader [...]

    Pingback by KDE und RSS | Nachrichten aus der Vault on March 18, 2013 at 1:10 pm



  43. (I found and reposted my old OwnCloud issues list but you removed it; too long?)

    Comment by Brandon on March 18, 2013 at 2:24 pm



  44. [...] auch die Entwickler von ownCloud haben sich vorgenommen, die RSS Funktion zu verbessern, um Usern die Möglichkeit zu geben, die eigenen RSS-Feeds selbst zu hosten. Die Funktion wird zur Zeit aktiv programmiert und soll als Plugin im App Repository erscheinen. Quelle: ownCloud Blog. [...]

    Pingback by Google Reader wird eingestellt – warum ich noch warte » diegelernten blog on March 18, 2013 at 2:49 pm



  45. [...] Google Reader’s sunset is the dawn of ownCloud News [...]

    Pingback by ak078 – Das schwebene iPhone im Nirvana | apfelklatsch on March 18, 2013 at 3:53 pm



  46. @Brandon: yes, too long. also, I don’t understand how all of this is related to my post.

    Comment by cosenal on March 18, 2013 at 4:37 pm



  47. @cosenal: Only because you asked me above “@Brandon: more specifically, what doesn’t work well in ownCloud?” I was trying to answer you specifically with a list of multiple failings I had documented in the proper place (and which were never resolved). Anyway, good luck with the plugin!

    Comment by Brandon on March 18, 2013 at 5:55 pm



  48. Cool idea. Rather than reinventing the wheel, though, have you considered whether integration with Tiny Tiny RSS (http://tt-rss.org) or NewsBlur (https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur / http://www.newsblur.com) would be a better idea?

    Comment by Michael on March 26, 2013 at 2:13 pm



  49. @Michael: yes, we evaluated that very careful before starting. I will not bother you with the details, but we basically realized that integrating tt-rss into owncloud would have been more painful than writing a reader from scratch. With newsblur it’s different, since it’s more than a plain rss reader, but it has all that training/intelligence that we didn’t want in our reader. Rather, in the beginning I got inspired by Lilina (http://getlilina.org/), which is in fact based on the library we use to parse the feed, that is SimplePie.

    Comment by cosenal on March 26, 2013 at 6:40 pm



  50. [...] Servicios de sincronización privados: una aplicación cliente se sincroniza con un servicio online. Este servicio no está abierto a terceras aplicaciones. Podría ser el caso de NetNewsWire y el de Owncloud. [...]

    Pingback by Noticias del RSS - derrotero · net on March 27, 2013 at 7:15 pm



  51. Unless I’m missing something, the News folder is empty currently, so there’s nothing to install to try it out… :-(

    Comment by Stephen on March 28, 2013 at 7:57 pm



  52. @Stephen: we moved the app to its own repository, that is https://github.com/owncloud/news

    Comment by cosenal on March 28, 2013 at 8:20 pm



  53. [...] Google Reader’s sunset is the dawn of ownCloud News [...]

    Pingback by ownCloud 5 Review | The Linux Action Show! | Jupiter Broadcasting on March 30, 2013 at 10:41 pm



  54. [...] Feedly Pro exceeds about $20 per year I’ll probably look into hosting my own RSS reader with ownCloud, Tiny Tiny RSS or something [...]

    Pingback by Feedly updates its RSS apps, but removes a favorite feature (for now) - Liliputing on April 1, 2013 at 2:08 pm



  55. Hey, did you mention to download a .zip, but I can not find the folder News. Is it within another one? Thank you very much. Greetings from Uruguay.

    Comment by Pablo Cardozo on April 8, 2013 at 11:28 am



  56. Sorry, I just read the other answer. Now download and install. Thanks again for your work!

    Comment by Pablo Cardozo on April 8, 2013 at 11:30 am



  57. Hello, I tried to do this by copying and pasting the folder in my apps, but at the time of install will not let me. Reading the readme included in the. Zip encounter some steps you do not understand how to make them:

    - Clone the app into the App Framework ** / var / www directory ** ::

    git clone https://github.com/owncloud/appframework.git

    - Clone the News app into the ** / var / www directory ** ::

    git clone https://github.com/owncloud/news.git

    - Both Link into ownCloud’s apps folder ::

    ln-s / var / www / appframework / var / www / ownCloud / apps
    ln-s / var / www / news / var / www / ownCloud / apps

    - Activate the App Framework app first, then activate the News app in the Apps menu

    I have no access to those directories as it is a shared hosting.

    Comment by Pablo Cardozo on April 8, 2013 at 12:22 pm



  58. [...] 4: ownCloud geht alpha mit eigenem News Reader via Cashy Update 3: Feedly – 500 000 neue User in 48 Stunden via Cashy Update 2: Google [...]

    Pingback by Google ohne Leser – aka Reader | Bottek.com on April 18, 2013 at 4:04 am



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