I use Tiny Tiny RSS as an alternative to Google Reader. It is an open source web based RSS feed reader.
I created a little Python script that shows a notification on the Mac OS X desktop in case I have unread articles. It is called from crontab. Every ten minutes, the script checks for unread messages and shows a message via Growl:
Requirements:
- Python, which is probably already installed on most Linuxes and Mac OS X. It uses the json, urllib2 and os modules
- Growl, install also growlnotify from the Extras
- And Tiny Tiny RSS, tested with version 1.5.5
For Linux, libnotify provides the a command line interface for displaying notifications: notify-send. You can use that instead of growlnotify for showing the number of unread articles. In Ubuntu, notify-send is found in package libnotify-bin.
#!/usr/bin/python
import json
import urllib2
import os
class request:
pass
class ttrss:
session_id = ''
def __init__(self, url):
self.baseurl = url
def getResponse(self, call):
call['sid'] = self.session_id
httpres = urllib2.urlopen(self.baseurl, json.dumps(call))
ttrssresponse = json.load(httpres)
return ttrssresponse
def login(self, username, password):
req = { 'op': 'login', 'user': username, 'password':password }
res = self.getResponse(req)
self.session_id = res['content']['session_id']
def getUnreadCount(self):
req = { 'op': 'getUnread'}
res = self.getResponse(req)
return int( res['content']['unread'] )
# TT-RSS API URL
t = ttrss('http://example.org/tt-rss/api/')
# Username, password
t.login('yourusername','yourpassword')
unread = t.getUnreadCount()
if (unread > 0):
cmd = "/usr/local/bin/growlnotify -a Mail -m '" + str( unread ) + " unread article(s)' Tiny Tiny RSS"
os.system( cmd )
