SSR: A very basic replacement for Google Reader

Google Reader is going away, which is too bad, because I love it. It is/was an awesome product with a lot of great features used by a lot of people for a lot of different reasons. I, however, started using it about a year ago, and for just one thing: to combine feeds from about 20 different websites into one long page. Stories come in and I read them and mark them as read, or save them for later. I occasionally used 'show all' (previously-read) and 'search' to find thing I've read in the past, but I never used tagging, sharing, or anything else. I loved that it was 100% browser-based for all the natural advantages that gives (like clicking on links and viewing content in the browser of your choice, working anywhere with no installation, etc.), although I was never happy with the way scrolling looked on an iPad -- it did this weird thing where as you scrolled, it would move every other line one pixel, then the other lines, resuling in a weird shimmering look. (And it showed up in regular mode in Safari and in "mobile" mode in Chrome. Very strange. And annoying, because on an iPad, I want to see the whole post, not just the title that I have to click to show the content.) Otherwise, I liked it and I was happy with its default behaviors, like "all collapsed on the phone; all expanded everywhere else."

Luckily, since my needs are few, I can more or less replicate what I like most about it pretty easily. I'm calling it SSR, for 'Super Simple Reader'. (And that's 'RSS' backwards. Ain't I clever?) If I were anything more than a second-rate PHP hack, I'd build it in Google App Engine (wouldn't that be funny) or Amazon Web Services, which you can use free for one year. It will be a good solution for me, and possibly for people like me: people who have their own webservers and enjoy installing LAMP apps on them. I'm starting with the MagpieRSS bundle and if I code long enough, I'll eventually recreate Tiny Tiny RSS. (Just kidding. TT RSS is awesome -- it basically makes your browser look like Netscape Mail stuffed full of feeds -- but a) I want mine to be very simple and b) I really want it to be optimized for mobile. TT RSS does have a mobile view but it's not what I want.)

Tiny Tiny RSS screenshot
Tiny Tiny RSS is awesome, but not what I want.

I don't have much time to hack -- usually just a couple hours here and there in a week -- but this isn't just a dream. I've actually started. I've got a few months, right? :-)

Random notes -- very much a work in progress...