I have an increasing tendency to skim all my RSS feeds in Netvibes just to finish reading them as quickly as possible and not really reading (or enjoying) the content.
My therapist recommended some diversion therapy; install the Gregarius aggregator locally on my PC, import my OPML and experiment with Dave Winer’s controversial ' River of News’ concept.
Now my previous experiments with Joomla and subsequently WordPress and Drupal have been made incredibly easy by Wamp (a packaged distribution of mySQL, PHP and Apache).
And so it proved again. A mere 7 minutes to get Gregarius working. A further 29 minutes to fail to work out why Netvibes has chosen to resurrect and export some dear, dead departed feeds (with Japanese writing) from beyond the grave.
Gregarius has the conventional two pane (feed-article) view and you can quickly review all articles from all blogs in reverse date order. You can then choose to expand any articles of particular interest.
Of course, for the full cascading river effect, I had to collapse the feeds and remove all tags, folders and categories to simply let all feeds flow as one raging torrent. There are no Oracle blogs anymore. You are all fighting for a place on the raft.
The default Gregarius theme is a little monochrome for my liking or maybe that is the default ‘Newspaper’ view (black and white and read all over) but there are other themes available to liven up the RSS experience.
So now I am no longer skimming my 81 feeds but blissfully wallowing in this river of news.
All of this excitement is almost enough to encourage me to investigate pricing (again) for hosted PHP/mySQL providers so I can read the same feeds from multiple computers.