Friday, April 2, 2010

Newsbeuter and Google Reader



If you go to the newsbeuter website you'll be told that it's the mutt of rss feed readers. It is text based and highly configurable. Newsbeuter is fairly easy to set up and configure. Just install newsbeuter using your distros package manager. It should be available on most distributions Ubuntu, Fedora, Opensuse, Arch, Slackware, Debian, etc.

Now that it's installed, just type newsbeuter in the terminal to start it. There's probably not much to see as we haven't added any RSS feeds yet, but I usually start an application before configuring it because usually there are configuration files that are created when an app first starts up. Press "q" to quit.

To add feeds open the ~/.newsbeuter/urls file and simply add your feed urls to that file. Save and close and you're good as gold. You can edit the ~/.newsbeuter/config file to customize your keybindings and other settings. See the man page for configuration options.

I recently learned that you can use newsbeuter to view your Google Reader feeds. To do this make sure you have the latest version of newsbeuter and simply add the following to your ~/.newsbeuter/config file.

urls-source "googlereader"
googlereader-login "your-googlereader-account"
googlereader-password "your-password"

Save and start newsbeuter. You now have your Google Reader Feeds.
Please see the newsbeuter documentation site for more configuration options.
Enjoy.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Just read your post about newsbeuter and Google Reader, thought you might be interested in the GoogleReader vim plugin. Just found it yesterday and it works great for me.

Jared said...

Chrelad, Thanks. It's pretty sweet.

PeterStJ said...

NewsBeuter is pretty slow with Google reader, it seems like it does not cache anything, instead it makes requests to the server all the time, from entry to entry, for marking/starring entries and so on, I likes newsbeuter because it is very fast and configurable (can pass entrt items to external script which is very useful for image and video loading ) but it does not play that well with google reader.

For example using the same computer and reading via firefox and via newsbeuter on the same network connection I see significant delays in newsbeuter. Maybe their web client does something smarter (for example authenticates only once and not for every request, or cache things)

I have not tried the vim sweet, but might if I find the time:)