Feeddemon’s unfortunate pairing with Newsgator has left me looking for alternatives. I’ve nothing against the move and am happy for Brad, but I don’t want my data tied to a commercial provider who can opt to change their terms of service, so I’ve been casting about for something else to use. Ironically the issue that drove Feeddemon to partner up with Newsgator was a need for persistent storage of ‘feed state’ – if I read my feeds at work then want to check them again at home, I don’t want to see the same data all over again. Feeddemon turned to Newsgator for a solution to this problem. I’m turning elsewhere. I’ve tried a variety of things, most notably RSSowl, which is really a pretty decent aggregator, but it lacks a couple of features I’ve come to rely on and lacks an elegant ‘feed state’ solution.

Enter gregarius, a php/mysql-based server side RSS aggregator. It’s still in the relatively early stages of development and is a bit rough around the edges, but it’s entirely usable, such that I’ve been using it as my primary aggregator for the last 3 weeks. You can check out my instance of it if you want to play around with a copy (or get a glimpse into where the bulk of the content of this site ultimately comes from, for that matter). You won’t be able to see the administrative back end but you can get a sense of how it works.

It’s somewhat slower than using Feeddemon is, and I still haven’t gotten feed filtering working as I’d like, but at this point I’ve concluded it’s good enough for my daily use. Kudos to the developers for an excellent project (but please, use your devlog! 😉