Lying with the Dogs

I’ve griped and groused here on this old blog, and back in my days with the Twitter, about my need to consolidate all my RSS and Atom feeds under one roof, preferably a web-based one.

I tried Gregarius, as detailed here. And it was cool. I was hosting my own feeds. Problem was, I found the interface to be somewhat impenetrable; it was hard, at least for me, to mark items read, and have them stay so marked. I liked the tagging features, and appreciated the available plugins and themes. Nevertheless, it remained a pain to use.

From there, I migrated to Feed on Feeds. It was easier to navigate, though lacking in available plugins. After a few weeks of use, I noticed that read articles popped up again, unaccountably. Or worse, that unread ones got marked read.

With both, I had to lash up my own feed update mechanism. With both, perhaps my wanting it to do everything I wanted out of the box was part of the problem. Reading feeds shouldn’t be so high maintenance in my world.

So, shamefacedly, and bashfully, I went to the Google, and opened an account.

After a week, I’ll say that it’s a great web-based reader. I don’t like the Google, I don’t trust them, and consider them to be the new Microsoft. Any company whose mantra is Do no Evil is hiding or doing something, to my notion. Do no Evil is best demonstrated by example.

But, at least for now, all my subscribed feeds are back in one sock.

-k-

I’m Gregarius!

For a while now, I’ve been bemoaning the state of my feed readers.Not that they don’t work, but that I have a different reader on each computer I own. I have NetNewsWire on the Mac, Sage on one laptop, RSSOwl on another machine. Each with its own set of feeds.There’s a huge duplication of feeds across this setup; but then each system has at least one feed unique to it.

The fix to all this is obvious; move to a web-based aggregator. I’ve looked at many free and not free web aggregators; for one reason or another, none of them appealed to me. Google Reader is widely used and praised. I don’t do any more business with Google than is absolutely necessary; I don’t trust them, and so I use the Google only for search.

My options then became clear; I had to host my own aggregator. Thanks to the fine folks at Gregarius, I am now the proud maintainer of my own web-based feed aggregator and reader. 24 hours into the effort, and all is well. Gregarius supports OPML import/export, so getting my feeds populated was a snap. There is a huge selection of themes to customize the output, and Gregarius also generates ts own feed of feeds, so I can have, Google Reader-like, a sidebar item for my current feeds if I so desire.

So, I’m loving life again, with a reader that I can tweak and mold to my own liking.

Thanks open source, and thanks, Gregarius.

-k-
[stags]geek, gregarius[/stags]
[tags]gregarius[/tags]