Goread - Open Source Google Reader clone in Go

Does someone have a more in-depth description of what exactly happens when I'd log in with a google account there, besides "Google will share your email address with Go Read" and "Go Read may use your email address to personalize your experience on their website"? Or is that really all there is to it?

patrickaljord2• 13 years ago

Yes, this permission only shares your email.

unwind• 13 years ago

Sharing an email address is not the same as sharing email, is it? At least your reply just confused me more. :)

tklovett• 13 years ago

Here is what happens on Go Read's end: https://github.com/mjibson/goread/blob/master/goapp/user.go#...

Here is the information that Go Read stores per user: https://github.com/mjibson/goread/blob/master/goapp/types.go...

SkippyZA• 13 years ago

Great job. I have been working on a similar Google Reader replacement using Ruby and Ember.

fooyc• 13 years ago

This is the most approaching clone of Google Reader I've seen so far.

It has one big problem, however:

A feed can have only one tag (or, if you see a tag as a folder, a feed can be only in one folder).

This is a big problem because Google Reader's UI encouraged to add multiple tags on a feed (you didn't moved a feed from one folder to an other : you selected a list of tags the feed appear in). And the OPML format allows this too.

So, if you import an OPML export, half your feeds may appear to be missing.

---

An other great Google Reader alternative is http://yoleoreader.com/ . Apart from its UI sometimes freezing for a second (maybe due to synchronous I/O or too long script execution), it's an other great Google-Reader-like RSS reader.

shrikant• 13 years ago

I personally use https://www.inoreader.com/ and found it to be a simple and brilliant Reader-like replacement.

BHSPitMonkey• 13 years ago

I've been enjoying https://digg.com/reader as a "close-enough to Google Reader" substitute, as well. They launched a mobile-browser-friendly update a few days ago, and the Android app is supposedly "very soon" to release.

lilc• 13 years ago

Same here. And most important to me, it implements the Google Reader API, so my filtering scripts continue to work.

mwexler• 13 years ago

Big is relative, of course. I don't think I ever used that feature of Google Reader, and it's unclear how many others depended on it as well.

That being said, of course, it's a great feature to have.

kip_• 13 years ago

I'm rather happy with http://bazqux.com/

Granted, it's a one man shop, but he's charging $9-$29/year, so hopefully enough to keep it running. It's written in Haskell and Ur/Web, is quite fast, took my Google Reader takeout with no issues (400 feeds scattered across 35 folders) Allows login via Twitter, Facebook, Google or OpenID.

davidw• 13 years ago

Do you have to self host? If not, how are they going to keep it around once more people start to use it? Looks nice and clean. Thank you!

loumf• 13 years ago

It's hosted on Google App Engine. He has ads on the free version and an ad-free subscription option. You can self host if you want and it would probably stay under the free tier on AppEngine if it's just you (depending on the number of feeds and update frequency)

mjibson7• 13 years ago

You can either pay or self host (which is quite simple).

camus• 13 years ago

Very good ! i also checked http://yoleoreader.com/ which is amazing too.

i'm building my own with nodeJS. As usual my requirement are that it should work without javascript on , so i implemented the static site first ,the rest will come later :

http://feedpress.herokuapp.com/

click on about for the source code.

skrause• 13 years ago

For me the end of Google Reader meant that I could finally stop using my Google account altogether since Reader was their only service I was using. It's a shame that so many of the Google Reader alternatives want me to sign in with my Google account again. In that case I simply won't use them (I'm looking at you, Feedly).

kazagistar• 13 years ago

Well, if you find it worthwhile, feel free to submit a merge request that adds the authentication method of your choice, right?

levosmetalo2• 13 years ago

This attitude is what's wrong with the open source software. It is important to him, but not that important to spend time getting to know code base in a language he might not be familiar with in order to implement it himself. Or he just might not be a programmer.

If you want actual users for your project, not developers, than either implement what they ask for or say you don't want to. If enough people complain, it is a good sign that you are missing important features that prevent adoption. Build it yourself is not an answer to those users, and is just plain annoying.

If you want to be able to answer with "send me a pull request" then just stop creating end users software, and build some library instead that is used by developers.

AndrewDucker• 13 years ago

How hard can it be to add Persona?

mjibson7• 13 years ago

I have the exact opposite reaction: a site that allows me to use my google account and not create another one will get me to sign up more readily. Adding persona support is being considered.

tracker12• 13 years ago

I have to agree, so long as the permissions are limited... I don't like what a lot of sites/apps ask as default permissions... they tend to seriously overreach... as long as it's essentially for authentication, and maybe my verified email address, I'm okay with that.

ForFreedom3• 13 years ago

What do you use as email?

andrewaylett• 13 years ago

Not the OP, but I self-host. I do have a Google account, I don't like using it for SSO. I don't use many Google properties nowadays -- Maps seems to be the biggie.

squidi• 13 years ago

HTTPS URL is https://go-read.appspot.com/

rly_ItsMe• 13 years ago

I tried fever http://feedafever.com/. Its a nice selfhosting feed reader. But after a while using online feed readers i still use Operas build in Reader.

kodr• 13 years ago

Well... since everyone are sharing their readers, I'll share mine: http://theoldreader.com/

The one feature that most others don't have, sharing and commenting with friends.

anovaskulk• 13 years ago

On the other hand this one is closing its registrations, and deleting users registered after some date X.

pronoiac• 13 years ago

They were talking about letting unpaid customers go, but they found backing, to let them keep up the good work: http://blog.theoldreader.com/post/57274499607/the-new-old-re...

adestefan• 13 years ago

It's also really slow, can't seem to keep track of my read items, and has been down an awful lot the past month. I had high hopes, but it's close to the point where I'm starting to look for something else. Again.

kzahel• 13 years ago

I tried to import my feed.ly feeds to this but the page stuck on "OPML import is happening. It can take a minute. Don't reorganize your feeds until it's completed importing. Refresh to see its progress." and I got no errors in the javascript console. It looks promising though. I find feed.ly to be too gimmicky and noisy. I like the minimal style of go read.

One thing that's missing from every google reader replacement I've tried is the ability to infinite scroll through a feed history. Somehow google knew how to request RSS feed pagination parameters.

mcantrell• 13 years ago

I made a feed reader called Bulletin that has infinite scroll that works just fine. Can't see why others couldn't do it as well. We also went for minimal on the UI.

bulletin.io

jc4p• 13 years ago

Very cool to see my co-worker's pet project front and center on HN when I wake up :) Matt's also working on an Android app for Goread at the moment, which is also open source: https://github.com/mjibson/goread-android/

WayneS• 13 years ago

I really wanted to like this but it was missing a couple key features for me. I described by problems in the github issues page and wondered back the theoldreader. When theoldreader got slow and was down for over a day I came back and found he has continued to make fixes and addressed most by my issues. Very happy now, and the website is consistently responsive which I care about much more than fancy layouts.

joshbaptiste• 13 years ago

Wow goread.io is much more responsive then when I first tried it around a month ago .. definitely will start contributing on Github.

egeozcan2• 13 years ago

The only thing I don't understand about this otherwise awesome project is that it being tied to the Google app engine.

mjibson7• 13 years ago

That's why it's so awesome. What don't you understand? I get infinite scaling and the datastore. When goread hit the HN front page and the gizmodo front page a few weeks ago, it wasn't any slower: everything scaled perfectly. Consider some of the other readers that have hit the HN front page - they became unusable for a day or two until the traffic died down. App engine is an incredible platform for developing scalable websites.

egeozcan2• 13 years ago

Yes, that's true when you want to scale. What I'm looking for is something that can run efficiently in my cheap VPS, me being the only user. For that purpose, I'd guess, App engine would be an overkill.

caiob• 13 years ago

Reader clones are the new Todos.

jfb• 13 years ago

And written in Go? HN catnip.

MattSayar• 13 years ago

I switched to Goread.io as my full-time Reader replacement since I first heard about it after the announcement of Reader's demise. It's been a decent alternative, but it lacks the polish that Reader had, especially when it comes to read/unread stories.

After weeks of use, I haven't bothered to figure out the consistency of how to mark a story as read, so sometimes it will take frequent clicks on "Mark all as read" to register that I've read something. When you click a story, it awkwardly jumps your scroll position around.

These are minor complaints, and it's still very usable otherwise, but I'm thinking about upgrading my subscription to encourage development.

mjibson7• 13 years ago

The jumping around got fixed last week. No one has reported the read/unread issues you've had. Could you report them to the github issues page? https://github.com/mjibson/goread/issues

ForFreedom3• 13 years ago

Are the unread RSS feed entries stored in db then called to be read later?

mjibson7• 13 years ago

Sort of. goread tracks a global unread date. Anything newer than that is unread. Any item you have read since then is added to a big list that is used to filter returned items. When you've read everything, it moves up the unread date and clears the list.

ForFreedom3• 13 years ago

Can I set this up on my own server from github?

mjibson7• 13 years ago

Yes. https://github.com/mjibson/goread has details.

specto• 13 years ago

So far very impressive. Definitely worth $30 a year

spurgu• 13 years ago

It looks nice and it's FAST! Plus it has a clean mobile UI. I think I'll have a Go and leave Feedly on the shelf, at least for a few days.

rkalla• 13 years ago

Matt, this is really kind of fantastic... nicely done! Would love to see a breakdown blog post of how you architected/implemented this... extremely responsive, pleasing UI, no surprises. Just works.

jqgatsby• 13 years ago

This is really awesome. I've been using this for a few days now and really like it. I've been programming in Go alot these days, so the fact that it's in Go is a big plus for me.

Goread - Open Source Google Reader clone in Go

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