So google reader is dieing or dead. There are several alternatives out there fever rss reader, looks cool but im not paying $30 for something i cant play with, Then there are a few pay ones at around $10 a month, im not paying for something that a free program like thunderbird can do. However Tiny Tiny RSS is free and host your own at home 😛

1. Getting and Installing XAMPP

So lets get Cracking (this is hopefully going to be short and sweet). Grab yourself XAMMP. I just grabbed the installer package (You may also need the 2008 C++ SP1 from microsoft ).

Once downloaded install, I removed some crap we didnt need, and it can be reinstalled later if you want it.

Choose where to install then hit next, When it asks you if you want to open the control panel choose yes. Start Apache and Mysql, Click Admin on Apache, choose English. Jump onto the secrurity page, then click the link below:”To fix the problems for mysql,phpadmin and the xampp directory simply use,”. On this next page set the MYSQL password, i wouldnt bother about the htaccess stuff as we will junk these pages soon. Stop and Start mysql. Click admin on the controll panel for mysql and ensure you can login. XAMPP is now running.

2. Tiny Tiny RSS

Lets grab Tiny Tine rss from here . (Its right at the bottom of the page), you may also need to grab winrar to extract this tarball.

Extract the tar .gz tosomewhere easy to find e.g desktop.

Find your Xampp directory (normally c:\xampp\) navigate to htdocs. Delete the files (leave the directories). Drop the files and folders from the extracted rar file to this htdocs location (everything inside the Tiny-Tiny-RSS-1.7.5 to that htdocs location).

Jump into the Mysql admin webpage again (open it from the Xampp control panel if you closed it) Once logged in select databases and create a new database called tinyrss.

On the left hand side select tinyrss database and select import, locate and choose “E:\xampp\htdocs\schema\ttrss_schema_mysql.sql” E:\ being where you installed XAMPP to.

Once the SQL script has been successfully executed. If you want go to privileges and create a new user, with whatever password your after, change host to local;

Start Wordpad (or your text editor of fancy{not notepad}), and open the config.php-dist file from your htdocs location. Change the DB_TYPE to mysql and enter your username password and database name. ENSURE YOU CHANGE THE SELF_URL_PATH TO ‘http://localhost/’. feel free to read through and change any other settings, however this will work for now.

Save this file as “config.php” .

3. Setup updating of feeds.

Open Task Scheduler / Scheduled tasks whatever they call it (Start -> Programs -> Accessories -> System Tools -> Task Scheduler. and choose “Create Task”.

Enter a name for the task and to run when user is logged on or not.

Go to the triggers tab, Choose “New” Tell the task to start at 12:01am, daily every 1 days, repeat task every 5 minutes for a duration of 15 minutes. Click OK

Go to the actions tab and choose New Action, enter “E:\xampp\php\php.exe” in the program/script menu and “E:\xampp\htdocs\update.php –feeds” in the arguments section, and start in to “E:\xampp\htdocs\” (E:\ being where you installed XAMPP to)

Click OK and OK, enter your password (this gives the script permission to run). and close task scheduler.

4. Using Tiny RSS

Open a browser window and navigate to http:\\localhost \  you should see the following;

Log in with Admin and password. Click Preferences and then select Feeds, Click OPML down the bottom. In another tab open your google reader account, click the Cog on the top right and select settings, then import/export, and export your reader content. Download the zip file. Inside will be an xml file put this on your desktop. In the tiny RSS reader choose this xml file and “import my OPML.”. This should then import all your feeds. From here you will need to wait a few minutes/hours for the feeds to populate but your basically done.

A few last minute tweaks i suggest; In preferences select Disable updates (as were using the task manager to do this for us),  Select Automatically mark articles as read, Select Combined feed display, Select Enable feed categories.

Before you click Save changes head on over to… Tiny Tiny RSS feeds forums here download the .zip file, extract the “videoframes’ folder to e:\xampp\htdocs\plugins\. Now click save configuration and let it reload.

Enlarge the plugins menu at the bottom  Enable what you like personally i have pintrest (share to pintrest), tweet (tweet this article) and videoframes (enable inline video), Now were done.