Wednesday: I'll make my own cloud services! With blackjack! And hookers!

In case you don't get the reference.

In the constant strategy of "fucking with shit that works," google announced today that they're shutting down google reader, which I use every day.  All day.  It is the sieve that brings me the entire internet each day, allowing me to read more than I would ever be able to do without it.

Since people who actually write news stories (and also like to have the entire internet brought to them each day) are complaining about this, I have some hope that it's a decision that google will reverse.  It can't be difficult for them to maintain, and quiet neglect seems to have worked well for most users.

Unfortunately, I'm not so naive as to trust them to do the right thing on this, and I know that I wouldn't be happy to live in a world where information needs to be hunted down each day across the wild savannas of a thousand webpages, knowing that there once existed a way to get everything delivered.  I looked at a number of other options, but they seemed to all have one of the following problems:

1. Tied to one device.  I read nightly on my laptop, and periodically on my phone.  Sushi Saturdays wouldn't work if I didn't have things to read on my phone instead of interacting with other people.
2. Formatted in a stupid way.  Apparently, a lot of RSS readers think I want some sort of newspaper style mosaic of random stories.  No. That's dumb. I want to be able to hit 'n', and skip to the next thing immediately.  I don't need to see it before it's active, but I want to be able to scroll through things in a single dimension.
3. Isn't tied into the browser.  I'm reading stories from the web.  I don't want to have another thing open all the time that duplicates browser functionality, and I don't want to have to use external connections to open links into a new browser tab.
4. Requires me to hand my feed information to a company.  I (used to) largely trust google with things.  I'm less happy providing this same information to some random company.  I would prefer they not know exactly how many cute animal feeds I follow to come up with all these bear perspective images.

This led me to thinking about how easy a homebrew google reader style application would be.  You need a task to poll the feeds, store the information in a database, and then serve that information up on a webpage.  The polling/data handling side is largely trivial, but I do giant data processing/data mining tasks every day.  It's the UI side of things that's complicated.  It would also require android development to handle reading on my phone.

And then I discovered that someone had already done that work for me.

TT-RSS has a package in Debian, requires a webserver with attached mysql server, and it turns out I already have one of those for my mythtv DVR.  I did a quick install, futzed with the configuration until it worked, and added a test feed to see that it works correctly.  It does, and has a clunkier UI than reader, but solves all the problems listed above.  Yes, all of them: there's an android reader already in the store.

I'm still hoping for google to come to their senses, but at least now I know that I have a backup route.  This is somewhat of an extension of a number of other things I run off of my home computers (CVS, phone autosync program to backup USB drives, DVR with media streaming, etc.), in that it allows me to have my own cloud service solution that I know will work without needing to worry about a capricious external corporation.  This is why we have open source.

• This misunderstands the point of food.
• Groucho Marx.  It's a fun story, take five minutes to read it.
• Paper stars. It's a sad story, but take a minute to go read it.
• Yes, Brad DeLong is probably right here, but we should also note that Spain and Italy never had to deal with decades of US economic sanctions.
• So new pope.  I heard he was a Jesuit, and that kind of gave me hope, as they're generally less batshit crazy.  Of course, then his actual views came out, and that kind of crushed that idea.  Then there's this, which kind of is a face-palm-y kind of thing.