WELCOME TO FEED ON FEEDS, your server side, multi-user RSS and Atom aggregator!

Why is a server side aggregator better than a desktop aggregator?

Desktop aggregators are great.  They sit there all day, pinging away at sites, and as soon as they notice something new, they pop up little windows on your desktop, and let you read items.  But what about when you go home from work?  Or what about when you are on a trip?  You get totally out of sync, and don't know what you've read and haven't read.  You are enraged.

A server side aggregator solves this.  It keeps track of what items you've read, and keeps happily checking up on your feeds no matter where you are.  Whenever you want to see what's new, you just bring up a web page and scan the newest items.  You can mark the items as read so they won't be shown again.  Or, you can just always show the most recent N items, like the way LiveJournal's friends pages work.  Also, having the aggregator in your browser eliminates the "impedance mismatch" that sometimes occurs between a desktop aggregator and your browser.  All your native browsing methods work on a FEED ON FEEDS page.  Open pages in new tabs, bookmark them for later, browse whatever way you like.

How do I install and use FEED ON FEEDS?

1. Download this tarball.
2. Explode it.
3. Copy fof-config-sample.php to fof-config.php, and edit it to contain the correct DB connection information.
• If needed, create a MySQL DB for FEED ON FEEDS.  Or, you can use an existing DB.
4. Upload the entire tree to wherever on your server you want FEED ON FEEDS to live.
5. Load the page http://{your server}/{wherever you put FEED ON FEEDS}/install.php.  The installer will first check that it can connect to your DB, and then attempt to create the necessary two tables.  Then, it will attempt to create a subdirectory called cache where it will store cached copies of RSS feeds.  This part of the installation may fail, as your PHP process may not have permission to create a directory.  You may need to create the directory {wherever you uploaded FEED ON FEEDS to}/cache/ yourself, and make sure it is writable by the PHP process.  If you needed to do that, reload install.php.
6. Just set a password for the admin account and you should be ready to go!
   

Upgrading from the previous version.

Using it.

• Go to your control panel, which is at http://{your server}/{wherever you put FEED ON FEEDS}/.
• Start adding feeds.  Click on "add feed" and enter the URL of an RSS feed, or a weblog.  FEED ON FEEDS will attempt to subscribe to an RSS feed at the location you gave, and if that fails, it will try to auto-discover the feed for the URL you gave.
• You can also add feeds by entering the URL of an OPML file, or uploading an OPML file from your computer.
• On the add feeds page, there is a bookmarklet that you can use to subscribe to any page you are viewing in your browser. Just drag the bookmarklet to your browser toolbar. Then when you are at a page that has an RSS feed, for example, messy-78, click on the bookmarklet to subscribe.
• As you add feeds, they will be read for items and will show up on the control panel.
• At any time, you can get your subscription list as an OPML file.
• The various links on the control panel should be self-explanatory. You can add and delete feeds, update them, mark items as read, and navigate to pages showing items.
• A note about updating feeds:  By default, FEED ON FEEDS will not update a feed more frequently than every 15 minutes.
• You can read feeds three different ways:
• By new items.  FEED ON FEEDS will show you all items, one one page, that are not marked as read, from newest to oldest.  You can click on the 'mark as read' links by each item to mark them as read, and they will disappear next time you load the page.  Or, you can read the entire page and click to mark all items as read.
• All items, paged.  FEED ON FEEDS will show you all items in the DB, 50 per page, newest items first.  You can page backwards to see older items.
• Today's items.  Just the items that were cached today will be shown.  You can navigate forward and backward by date.
  

Setting up scheduled updates.

Anything else I should know?

• FEED ON FEEDS is distributed under the GPL.
• FEED ON FEEDS would not have originally been possible without the totally sweet MagpieRSS PHP-based RSS parsing and caching system. It has now switched over the to new kid on the block, SimplePie.

• RSS auto-discovery, thanks to Keith Devens
• OPML import/export - tested and works with NetNewsWire
• MagpieRSS 0.5 featuring gzip support