For several years I’ve been using Liferea to read my web feeds and it has always done a good job, although it can be a bit slow if you have lots of feeds. Since I have 2 computers it’s always a pain to keep the feeds in sync. For this reason I’ve been considering moving to a web app like Google Reader or Bloglines. But then I thought “I’m leaving a free (as in freedom) application to use a closed source one, is it really necessary?” I using some non-free software but it’s mostly hardware drivers and codecs (except for gmail), but I really don’t fell good leaving a free app in favor of a non-free one.

So I decided to search if there was any service which used a open source tool to create a feed reader service. I did not find any, but I found Gregarious a open source reader which you can install in a webserver. I was a little reluctant to host one more thing, but I gave it a go. It’s a very small app, so the space it takes in web host is very small and it’s very easy to install: You just need to create a MySQL database and go to the Gregarious directory:

http://yourdomain/gregarious/install.php

After that just follow the instructions and it’s all set.

You can import OPML files from any feed reader, tt has a nice and clean “ajaxy” interface  and it’s pretty fast.

Your feeds can be viewed by anyone if they get to the reader’s directory but you can protect the directory using .htacess, which is what I did.

Here’s the screenshot.