Back in the early days of RSS I tended to use desktop aggregators as they worked the best. As my job changed and I was switching between work and home computers I found it problematic to have it at only one location. Eventually the web-based aggregators matured and I signed up at bloglines. I was very happy with the service but prefer to host things myself if possible so I have more control and can tweak things to work the way I want. Having the search/data local is also a plus as I found the bloglines search not working well for me.

I can finally do this thanks to Gregarius. The default layout is very bloglines-ish which is nice and it tends to work much better than bloglines itself. I was having a lot of problems with bloglines lately with their javascript based feed list. It’s also themeable so I can tweak things as I like. The features and feed updating are great and it easily handles my 300+ feeds with ease.

The product alone isn’t why I’m recommending it, but instead the development side of things. The first install of the program was not fun as it used php short tags which I have disabled (do alot of xml work). This forced me to search and replace through many files and was sometimes hard to track down. Once I got it working I went ahead and checked out the dev site and saw that some of the tags were fixed. I reopened the ticket to have the short echo tags updated and I’d say it wasn’t a day or two later that it was fixed. I now run the SVN version of it and love it.

I still haven’t had time to tweak the theme how I want but if you are looking for a aggregator for either yourself or work then give Gregarius a whirl. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed. I highly recommend checking out the SVN version or downloading a nightly as there are plenty of fixes and it still seems to work great.

BTW. If you are only tracking a few feeds you may prefer lilina. With the number of feeds I track the display just wouldn’t cut it.