I’ve had the Tao of Gregarius link on the front page for a couple of weeks now, but have made no formal intro, so here goes.
Tao of Gregarius is an web-based RSS feed reader/aggregator, similar to the Google Reader or Bloglines. Except of course I’ve already added all the feeds to it, so if you are not using a reader already and are perhaps scared off by the process of adding feeds or have been wondering what this RSS stuff is all about, you may find this one useful.
In short, the benefits of using a feed reader is that you can get through a whole lot of news, blogs posts, and/or opinion pieces in a fraction of the time, because they will all be aggregated in one place for you. Just scan through all the headlines and open any that interest you. No more going to a dozen different sites every day.
Tao of Gregarious currently has close to a hundred feeds from around the world. The selection is of course tailored to my interests, in line with the themes of this site, but most of the feeds are very general. The news and opinion feeds are taken from dozens of news sites around the world. This includes every online Australian site that currently supports RSS as well as the opinion page content from about 20 sites (most but not all are in the US or Europe). This currently includes The Australian, Crikey, the NY Times, Jerusalem Post, The Guardian, LA Times and The Globe and Mail. And of course many others. World news is taken from sites like the BBC, Reuters, CNN, Spiegel and SMH.
There are also about a dozen blogs listed, including Little Green Footballs, Jihad Watch, The Brussels Journal, Tim Blair. and Michelle Malkin.
I am adding more feeds all the time and am open to requests.
The feeds can be sorted in several ways – by feed folder, by feed category or by tags. A feed can only be in one folder, but it can be listed under several categories. So for example you may only be interested in reading the blogs, so you can read the feeds in the ‘blogs’ folder. Or you may want to read all the feeds in the ‘Australia’ category – this would list the Australian news, opinion and blogs together. I am not using the tags sorting as yet.
Currently personal accounts are not available, although that is a definite possibility for the future (when the Gregarius developers add that feature, which they say they are going to). This means that only I can mark items as being already ‘read’, and the status is shared by all. I recommend setting the reader to viewing both ‘read’ and ‘unread’ items, as obviously whether I’ve read something or not is of no consequence to you. I also recommend using the reader with Firefox (I’ve been surprised to see how many people are still viewing this site in IE). That way you can open the reader in one tab and as you scan through the headlines just right click and open any items that you want to read in full on the source site in a new tab. Some sites include the full articles or posts in their feeds, others only the first few lines or paragraphs, so you still need to open them in a new tab/window. I regularly clear items out that are older than 3 days old, but you can always expect to see the last 3 days worth of items in the reader.
The difference between Gregarius and say Google Reader, btw, is similar to the difference between a blog on Blogger and a blog like Tao of Defiance that uses the Wordpress platform. With Blogger you get what you’re given and thats kind of it. With Wordpress you can add whatever plugins and themes you want and edit the code yourself, so it is far customisable. Likewise Gregarius, so hopefully the platform will continue to expand as people write more plugins etc.
The reader auto updates all its feeds every 45 minutes, so you can keep it open and check back throughout the day to see what new items have popped up on any of the news sites or blogs.
http://www.taoofdefiance.com/newsreader