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Rnews Highlights

 
*About the Software
 
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If you're reading this page, chances are high that you already know what a feed aggregator is. It's what you manage your hundreds of RSS and Atom feeds with. Why would you want one server-side? Well, a server-side aggregator is:

  • Easy. You interact with the aggregator with your web browser, where you're going to be reading your news anyway.
  • Accessible. Read news from anywhere you have a net connection, whether work, the beach house, or a coffee shop.
  • Consistent. What you've seen and what you haven't is kept consistent, no matter where you are.

Rnews is a tool Adrian wrote to do this because he couldn't find one readily available at the time he wanted it. It is written in PHP, and is similar in functionality to a few other open source projects, but has a significantly different interface. So he decided to release it to the general public for others to use as well. It has since evolved into the best aggregator out there (not that we're biased).

Requirements: MySQL 4.1 or later, PHP 4 or PHP 5, and Apache. Rnews has successfully been hosted on Windows XP, FreeBSD, Debian, and Mac OS X 10.3, and browsed with Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer.

*Features
 

An extensive set of features is available on its own page, along with a zoomed-in look at the main feed-reading interface.

*Download Rnews
 

You can download Rnews, and see the software requirements and installation instructions on the download page.

!Rnews 0.91 released
May 1, 2008

This release has a raft of new features, bug fixes, and performance improvements. It's definitely the best Rnews, yet. Thanks to everyone who contributed ideas and bug reports!

  • Feeds are scored using personalized statistics, one- and two-column block views are more flexible, keyword search is supported, heuristics try to fix broken feeds, and feeds may be added using bookmarklets or a Firefox extension.
  • New user options were added for keeping stats, expanding articles in single-feed view, and opening links in a new window.
  • Rnews received a styling upgrade, with rollover icons and more AJAX interaction.
  • IP-locked cookies are now optional (though recommended).
  • Many bug fixes, in caching, IE presentation, redirects, and elsewhere.

Database structure has changed, but there is now an automatic upgrade process (from 0.8x only). See the instructions on the download page.

Update: minor bug in 0.90 is fixed in 0.91, which is drop-in compatible.

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