The more I think about it, the more I believe that the links I bookmark everyday are an important dimension of my online life.
They're mine to keep.
In late 2011 Google »integrated« several of its Reader's features into GooglePlus. Those features became useless after what we feel was an amputation of vital parts. We mainly missed the sharing goodness and as it happened, we were looking for Google alternatives anyway at that time.
To replace the core functionality, we settled with the open-source feed reader tiny, tiny rss (which is neither tiny nor tiny, tiny by the way, but rather great), in short: tt-rss. Even though it exceeds Google Reader in some aspects (yay, self-hosting and open source!), for us it lacks a few neat features, too. The things we miss and are about to (re-)build are:
1
Drive-by-Sharing
Share any page you are browsing with a simple, intuitive bookmarklet, even though you're not subscribed to the website's feed (it might not even have one). See the screenshot above for an example.
2
Shared-Widget
To show the non-tt-rss-using world what you share with other tt-rss-users, gritttt-rss provides a widget that shows the latest items from tt-rss' public shared feed on your website (examples can be seen embedded on the lower right on both Nic's website and Jan's website).
3
Import
In order to make the move feel like Google Reader never happened, gritttt-rss lets you import your historic starred and/or shared items from Google Reader into tt-rss.
We hope an image helps to see how we envision these three ways for articles (that you want to share with the world) to flow around your tt-rss instance (click to enlarge). All that is needed as direct addition to tt-rss is one dedicated feed in its database:
Where to go next with this?
Fundamentally, gritttt-rss allows a user to keep a list of their bookmarked links. (S)he can also share them via RSS and a widget, but
collecting bookmarklets is the primary functionality:
The more I think about it, the more I believe that the links I bookmark everyday are an important dimension of my online life. I bookmark a couple links everyday,
and years later I can look back and understand what I was interested in during certain times.
Unlike online services like Delicious or Pinboard, however, the user hosts the list
of bookmarked links him- or herself - (s)he really owns the data. And the method (the gritttt-rss code) is open-source.
To make gritttt-rss work, we have used tt-rss as the vehicle of choice. It hosts the list of bookmarked links in its database and via its
RSS-subscriptions, it provides a very convenient method to bookmark links (via sharing or starring). Basically, we only added the feature to share any other website
you're browsing on. However, gritttt-rss could also be independent of tt-rss -
it could do its work of building up a self-hosted list of bookmarks using other software (e.g. a different RSS Reader) as vehicle,
or even write only to an archive of plain RSS files.
This is just something that is on our minds now. As it stands, gritttt-rss is working very pleasantly for us and we already keep track of what has been
important to us every day :)