Until recently I solely used TinyTinyRSS for staying on top of the various news, following application releases/updates and so on. But, few weeks ago I started to looking at different feed aggregation applications.
From the technical standpoint TTRSS was really on top of it. It worked quite fine. The fact that it is written in PHP and supports SQLite, PgSQL and MySQL meant that it was easy and cheap to host anywhere.
Now you’re surely wondering why the heck would I switch from it then? Apparently for no great reason at all. I was looking for something simpler perhaps. I’ve also stumbled few times on their forums where developers where rude to end-user for no apparent reason. I don’t like that kind of behavior. Although I, as a worthless end user, won’t be missed in any way, shape or form, I certainly have a right to choose what to use, so here we are :-)
“Simpler? In which way is the Miniflux simpler?” - you might ask. What I like about this new aggregator is that it is single binary. Source is in Golang which makes it quite fast and simple as well. But enough of that mumbo-jumbo. Below are some of the killer features for my personal use-case.
Upsides
Available in repositories
The fact that package is available in APT repositories and is regularly updated is quite nice and it allows me to simply update this app as I would any other package on the system. That is; automatically.
Fever compatible
It has an option, in the form of the simple tick-box, that turns on Fever API compatibility, which means that all of the sudden I now have lots of supported mobile and desktop clients which sync with my Miniflux instance. My client of choice is Reeder.
Wallabag intergration
I was surprised to see that Wallabag is available out of the box where I had to install plugin for it on TTRSS.
Fast interface
Although TTRSS was not-so-slugish, switching to Miniflux, in cases where I need to use web-interface proved to be worth-while for the interface snappiness alone. It just doesn’t have much of that Javascript bloat.
Full-content fetch
Where other clients just fetch what’s available in XML of the feed, Miniflux is able to fetch full article content. In fact, it can do that automatically for the feed and is just one tick-box away.
Downsides
Although I am fully satisfied with my new choice there are a few things I would like to see improved.
Customizable interface
Due to the fact that it is a single binary, and since their 2.0 rewrite which strives to make it simple, you’re not able to theme the app yourself easily. To do that you have to customize styles and build your own version. Hopefully this is something that will be changed in the future.
Bulk feed management
I still haven’t found a way to select multiple feeds and move them to different category. Or tweak the setting such as “Fetch original content” on the whole category, or all subscribed feeds.