Thu 03 Nov 2005

Gregarius is way too cool

In an effort to stay current with the world I adopted the practice of news feed aggregation. Before I upgraded to Ubuntu, I was using Liferea a gnome based GUI. It met my needs at the time and had a lot of great features. For example you could create virtual feed based a search filter. I used this to search Tech Bargains' feed for deals from Dell. (I was in the market for a Laptop.) That allowed me to filter out all the other noise generated by discount coupons provided by other vendors. About the only thing I didn't like was the fact it was a fat client.

When I switched to Ubuntu packages for Liferea didn't exists. Sure I could compile it on my own, but who has time for that? Certainly not me. So my ability to stay in touch with the world would have to rely on my own efforts to manually go to news sites and listen to the radio. I pretty much ignore the television when it comes to news. All the news channels are pretty much garbage.

This leads me to the next attempt. A friend of my turned my on to the idea of generating a news feed in HTML so I could view it on the web. He offered up, rawdog which is rather plain. But as stated on the web site, "rawdog is a RSS Aggregator Without Delusions Of Grandeur". So don't expect much. I wanted something that had folders, which is something I had setup with Liferea. I also wanted to be able to mark ideas as read. I typically just read what I want them mark everything read.

Unsatisfied with rawdog, I figured there had to be other OSS available. Using a patented technique by searching Freshmeat logged in sorting based on popularity, I found Gregarius listed right below rawdog. This package has everything I need. Essentially you are the admin of your feeds. If you are not logged in people can view your feeds. It also lets you have private feeds. Which is nice for a couple of sites I want to keep to myself. Plus you can mark feeds read. This too is a feature reserved for the admin. The feeds are pulled automatically when a new one is added. After that hit the refresh button to update the site. You can add a cron job but why bother.

Setup is virtually a snap. All I did was untar the package into the root of my website. It packaged plainly with the directory rss. It uses a database either MySQL and SQLite if you install the development version. I found this out on the wiki after I made several attempts to get SQLite to work. Realizing it wouldn't, I defaulted to MySQL.

I spent a few minutes moving my feed list over from rawdog and added a great looking theme. There are a few things I have not explored. One is tagging and the other is categories. Looks like you can hold a feed forever and use either a tag or category to try and locate it later. But there is also searching for this. I am assuming once you tag or categorize it then it will remain permanently. Otherwise you can delete feeds in the admin screen.

Here is a link to my feeds enjoy. I also gave it a permanent link on the left called RSS.

Posted by Christian Pearce at 2:11PM EST [ /site | # ]