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Gregarius : Server Side Feed Reader

 

I’ve spent the last week casually hunting around for alternate feed readers.  I’ve been using Google Reader for some time now. but I’ve been growing tired of it.  Desktop clients just don’t quite cut it for me as, just at work, I’m regularly between three different machines.  I think I’ve found one that I like!  It’s small, simple to install and configure and Free Software.  Gregarius.

Gregarius has been in development for a number of years now, although has recently slowed down.  I’d like to see things pick up again but, as usual in the Free Software world, that usually requires a community of users.  It currently has a fairly thorough wiki, forum, devlog (blog) and a list of features and configuration options.  The main reasons I like it are:

  • Lightweight and responsive
  • Very configurable.  Includes plugins and themes.
  • Simple feed management (categories, tags, etc)
  • Very clean default theme
  • Detailed search options
  • more…

For those that might be interested in trying out a server-side feed reader I thought I might outline some of the steps toward installing it.

Gregarius Installation

These steps mirror the setup I’ve decided to use on my web server.  You may need to alter some of the details to your needs.

cd /var/www/html/<br /> wget -c http://superb-west.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/gregarius/gregarius-0.6.1.tar.gz<br /> tar xf gregarius-*.tar.gz<br />

Database Creation

Gregarius uses a MySQL database to store and search the feeds you’re subscribed to.  The next step in installing this server-side feed reader is to create your database.

mysql -u root -p<br /> [PASSWORD]<br /> create database rss;<br /> quit;<br />

Configuration

The last step is updating the configuration file to know how to connect to the database, and what database to use.  This configuration is found in the gregarius folder, inside the dbinit.php.sample.  You’ll want to rename this file to dbinit.php and update with your database changes.  The fields you’ll need to update are:

define ('DBTYPE','mysql');<br /> define ('DBNAME','rss');<br /> define ('DBUNAME','db_user');<br /> define ('DBPASS', 'db_password');<br /> define ('DBSERVER', 'localhost');<br />

Once this is done you should be able to start using your Gregarius installation at: http://yoursite.com/rss/  Enjoy!

If you have any issues installing or using Gregarius please comment and let me know.  I’d really love to see more people using this, and if that means doing a bit of support and recruiting on my own, then so be it.