Google Reader Replacement

Google Reader, what’s that? It has been discontinued in 2013 - mainly because of the lack of mass appeal I guess. For me however it was an essential tool, as it kept me up to date on my blogroll via RSS feeds. So after the death of the reader, I moved all my feeds to feedly, where they have been ever since. But these days, as homelabs and self-hosted services are a feasible alternative to commercial services with all the benefits of keeping my own data at home, it has been time to rewire this essential part of my day.

My flow works like this:

  1. identify blogs to keep up to date with, e.g. Hacker News
  2. save the RSS feed using Reeder on iOS
  3. in the backend, that feed then gets added to feedly, which keeps tabs on what I have read already, and which articles I have saved
  4. Skim through the list and mark those which i want to read in depth with a star
  5. Have an IFTTT automation1, which pulls the starred/saved (same thing) articles into Instapaper, which strips out all the extraneous padding, advertising, stuff - and leaves me with a readable article that I can read in the Instapaper client on my mobile or my Mac.

Miniflux

Now what I needed was a replacement for feedly.com - and I found it in Miniflux. Miniflux now runs in a docker container on my home Synology NAS, which amongst being a backup location etc, also runs Docker containers and VMs for me. Miniflux is a bare-bone service, but this is exactly what I need. No bells and no whistles. It exposes the google reader API, which my Reeder client interacts with. It also directly integrates with Instapaper, so I am saving the IFTTT action and can safely delete both that and the feedly account.

For networking, and to avoid having to expose my NAS to the outside world, I am using Tailscale. So useful, I do not know how I managed without it. Sure, if I was consistent, I would go with a self-hosted Headscale, but this is not about consistency. I need my network to be rock-solid and 100% reliable, that’s why I am also paying for tailscale. Its DNS handling also enables me to route my family’s DNS requests through my redundant pihole setup transparently - lots of benefits to keep everyone safe.

  1. IFTTT has been around for a long time. It is an abbreviation for “If this, then that” - basically, you connect different services like Gmail and Dropbox, and then you define rules like “if there is a new email, save the attachment in the following Dropbox folder”. Or in this case, if there is a new starred article, push it into the Instapaper queue. ↩︎