I’ve been using feedly for as long as Google Reader has been discontinued, but lately it became annoyingly unreliable, either not loading any feeds or marking feeds as read, without even showing them to me once.

Since I already had this domain with a perfectly suitable web hosting package laying around mostly unused for years, I decided to migrate to a semi-self hosted solution.

I went with FreshRSS on the backend. The installation was as simple as to unzip and upload the installation package to my web space and following the installation instructions on the web frontend.

To import the list of feeds which I was following on feedly into my FreshRSS installation, I used the export function on feedly’s web interface and then imported the opml file in the FreshRSS web frontend.

I decided for Capy Reader as my new mobile RSS reader because it looked clean and simple and could mostly resemble my feedly user experience UI-wise.

Much to my surprise, I did not see any new articles after connecting to my FreshRSS server and refreshing the feed view in Capy Reader. I obviously missed the fact that the app is a sole consumer. It cannot tell the server to refresh its feed database.

Unfortunately, my web hosting package did not come with cronjobs, which would have been required to tell FreshRSS to update its feed database on a timed interval.

To update the feed database without a local cronjob, I went with a web based cronjob provider for now.

For this to work, an authentication token must be created in the FreshRSS user profile.

My update URL, as used for the cronjob, looks something like this:

https://freshrss.webnexus.de/p/i/?c=feed&a=actualize&ajax=1&maxFeeds=50&user=my_username&token=token_from_freshrss_user_profile

I decided for the following configuration to update the feeds every half an hour each day between 5 a.m. and 11 p.m:

*/30 5-23 * * *

I have been using the FreshRSS with Capy Reader combination for a few weeks now and couldn’t be happier!

Here is a screenshot of my minimalistic Capy Reader feed view: Black and white screenshot of a list of feeds with source, title and summary