Owncloud News, a RSS news reader for the self hosting cloud service Owncloud, is available in an Alpha version. That comes right at the time Google Reader is bound to see its end soon.
I must admit that I do not understand why Google decided to shut down the Google Reader service. Social media with their unstructured news areas are nice, but no match to a well structured news feed full of read and unread news. But, there are replacements, and one pretty wise choice would be to not depend on yet another web service, but to host it yourself.
In comes Owncloud: it can already host your addresses, calendars, files and musik and can be integrated with your desktop as well. Now a RSS reader app, Owncloud News was released as an Alpha version, and indeed already looks promising:
The installation is pretty smooth as well. The requirements are a running Owncloud 5 version, so 4.5 won’t do it. The installation itself basically consists of two steps: installing and activating the so called App Framework, which is supposed to be the foundation for other Owncloud apps in the future, and afterwards installing the news app itself:
# cd /var/www # git clone https://github.com/owncloud/appframework.git Cloning into 'appframework'... [...] # git clone https://github.com/owncloud/news.git Cloning into 'news'... [...]
I choose /var/www here because it is recommended in the manual and because there the appropriate user has the necessary access rights. But it could be any dir, since you only link the plugins anyway:
# ln -s /var/www/appframework /var/www/owncloud/apps # ln -s /var/www/news /var/www/owncloud/apps
Speaking about rights, make sure the web server can write cache files:
# sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/news/cache
Afterwards, login to your owncloud, and active the plugins: first the framework, followed by the actual application. Add feeds, play around, as you will see it works pretty nice.
What is still missing right now is an Android news reader which could sync with the server. When that is available as well, Owncloud News might become *the* Google Reader descendant.
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