Gregarius

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6 Mar 2006

It all started with some concerns about the security of Bloglines. I like web-based readers, but I was ready to graduate to something that I host. I settled on Gregarius, partly because Phil Ringnalda likes it. If Phil likes something, there must be a reason.

After using Gregarius for a few days, I became irritated with the default view. Links looked like regular text instead of a link. The text was gray on a gray background. For someone who spends at least an hour a day in my feed reader, that wouldn’t do at all. But this was open source, so I hacked the stylesheets and made it a little more readable.

I started looking over the bug tracker and Subversion commit logs and found shiny new features I wanted to try. So I moved to the bleeding edge and started running the latest code straight from subversion, instructing my server to grab the newest every day.

Then I started finding bugs, as you’re apt to do when you run development code. Soon I was fixing said bugs and submitting patches. I joined the developer’s mailing list and started lurking in the IRC room to keep track of what was going on.

My CSS hacks evolved into a full-blown theme, although I was the only one using it. When the developers were looking for themes for some testing, I sent mine over. Before I knew it I was offering advice and such to the developers.

Today I officially joined the development team. I’m going to be focusing on usability and making Gregarius easy to understand, use, and install.

Want to try my theme? Download simplicity.0.9.zip (It’s really made for Firefox. If you use another browser, you might not be happy with it).

screenshot of Simplicity theme

BillSaysThis
March 6, 2006 6:51 PM

No working demo?

Gen Kanai
March 7, 2006 3:00 AM

Adam, not sure if you are familar with it but Fazal Majid is building an RSS aggregator called Temboz. www.temboz.com Would love to hear your take on it. I'm still wedded to bloglines.

Phil
March 7, 2006 6:09 AM

What are the concerns about Bloglines security?

Adam Kalsey
March 7, 2006 8:37 AM

Phil: Several things. First off, they're vulnerable to a few XSS attack vectors that could allow an attacker to gain control over your account. It's possible these have been fixed by now, but last fall this was a problem, and continued to be a problem for months after it was reported. Secondly, I'm wary about putting private feeds (like internal bug databases) into a public aggregator, even without these vulnerabilities.

Maxx
March 8, 2006 8:06 AM

Thanks for the theme. I've had a similar situation with Gregarius, where I loved it, but thought it looked quite bad. I tried to play around with the style sheets but I'm not very knowledgeable about CSS. I noticed that we can now change settings of a theme using the Admin interface of Gregarius. That could be an awesome feature, to let us change fonts size and such. Great theme! Thanks

Johan Svensson
March 8, 2006 2:56 PM

Oh, this looks nice. The application at least, I'm somewhat undecided on the default theme. Going to give it a spin.

Sameer
March 9, 2006 10:01 AM

Welcome aboard. The simplicity theme looks really nice.

This discussion has been closed.

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