Gregarius

» see gregarius.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Gregarius was a feed reader you installed rather than signed up for. It arrived as a PHP tarball and wanted Apache with mod_rewrite behind either MySQL or SQLite. Unpacked on your own host, it gave you a web page that collected your subscriptions into one reading list, whichever of the competing syndication formats they arrived in. The project was registered on SourceForge on 6 January 2004 and released under the GPL.

The appeal was that your feeds lived where you lived. Bloglines and later Google Reader kept your subscriptions on somebody else's machine; Gregarius kept them on a shared host you were already paying for. OPML worked in both directions, so you could arrive from a hosted reader without retyping anything, and there was full-text search across the whole archive it had pulled down. Item tagging happened over AJAX, back when that was worth putting in a feature list.

Manolis Tzanidakis reviewed it for Linux.com on 3 April 2006 at version 0.5.2a and called the interface well designed and appealing to the eye, which was a higher compliment then than it reads as now. FreeBSD carried a port. Hosting resellers shipped one-click installers for it. For a brief window around 2006 it was the obvious answer to anyone who wanted a reader and did not want an account.

~ seven subdomains ~

The thing that makes this death legible is how much structure the project had built. The homepage pointed at a live demo on rss.gregarius.net, a WordPress development log on devlog, a Subversion browser and bug tracker on svn, a documentation wiki, a plugin repository, a theme repository and membership forums. Seven hostnames, each with its own job, for a program that one person mostly wrote.

~ 0.6.1 and nothing after ~

Version 0.6.0 went out on 30 July 2008 with a fix for what the release note called a moderately important security issue, and the devlog entry announcing it is signed simply "Marco". Four months later, on 26 November 2008, the 0.6.1 archives were uploaded. No post accompanied them. The devlog front page still had the 0.6.0 announcement at the top in September 2010, two years later, which is the clearest reading available of when the author stopped turning up.

There had been an SQL injection in 0.5.4 serious enough to get its own exploit-db entry, so the security work was not theoretical. An unmaintained PHP application facing the open web is a liability on a schedule, and the people still running it in 2013 were running a five-year-old one.

~ the frozen zone ~

Gregarius belongs to a genre more than to a market: software you obtained as an archive, pushed into a directory over FTP, then visited in a browser. A forum worked that way. So did a hit counter that wrote to a text file. I cannot claim to have run Gregarius itself, and what I recognize from those years is the sequence it asked of you: unzip, create a database, edit a config file, hope the cron job fires.

The archive shows the apex returning the same checksum on every crawl from late January 2009 to 25 September 2010, a page of roughly 2,450 bytes that nobody edited for twenty months. By 17 August 2011 that address served a ZoneEdit holding page instead, and devlog followed it eight days later. In 2013 the apex was an unconfigured nginx welcome screen. Today the name is absent from DNS entirely.

~ what the mirrors kept ~

The code outlived the project. That is what the GPL is for. Somebody pushed an unofficial mirror of the Subversion tree to GitHub, where it sits with three stars and a final commit in March 2011; a second copy got touched as late as 2016. The SourceForge files are still downloadable. You can stand Gregarius up this afternoon if you want to, and the only part you cannot recover is the plugin repository, because that lived on a hostname somebody declined to renew.

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