wanna read?

A lot of tools exist to read news. From mail readers, RSS readers, various micro-blogging clients, or IM bots, and what not. However, I noticed that I consume most of my news through the first two of this list, mainly mail readers and RSS readers…

I’m quite happy with mutt as a mail client. Being the one that “suck less” is probably his main quality, and with a good deal of macros and vim to write the occasional answer, I’m good. However, there are no “RSS reader” that would suck less. The most used is probably Google’s Reader, which I’ve been quite happy to use for some time. However, I don’t like my data stored in Google’s cloud, for every government to peek at… You can call me paranoid. Although the truth is I’m also quite annoyed by their ugly interface (and no, I don’t want another custom CSS through a browser extension, thank you).

I could use newsbeuter, which is said to be the “mutt of newsreaders”, and furthermore sync it with Google’s product. This would allow me to read the shit out of my news in a terminal or in a browser. I like the idea… but not so much Google’s Reader for the reasons mentioned earlier. Luckily, newsbeuter is also able to sync with a tool called TinyTinyRSS.

So my question currently is wether I should install another PHP application (PHP is the keyword) on an server, or leap from idea to code, and start writing this modular news aggregator that would directly feed news to a single store with different consumers: from a web interface to a bunch of IMAP folders to read news with mutt… Or should I just try to setup NewsBlur?

Damn… so many questions, so little time… and meanwhile hacker-news is still bubbling with more things to read.

Now I sound like I have AD/HD, but I’m just brainstorming. Thank you for your brain-time too,