Fever http://feedafever.com/ $30

So if your like me you probbably subscribe to far too many RSS feeds, don’t get me wrong I love RSS it’s the way I get most of my news. Recently I’ve reached my limit of what I can resonably get through in any one day. I’d ideally subscribe to more feeds but I really don’t have the time to read them all. I’d rather not suffer the ‘unread item guilt’ or ’second inbox syndrome’ that you can sometimes get with unread feeds. This is where the RSS aggregator Fever from Shaun Inman can help.

How is Fever different?

Fever is unique in a couple of ways, firstly (and most importantly) it’s a self hosted web app, meaning the Fever installation is stored on your web server so you will need hosting that’s running a recent version of PHP and MySQL. Fever is also different in the way it handles your feeds, this means you can subscribe to many more feeds without suffering the unread item guilt. This is achieved by organising your feeds into two categories, ‘must reads’ and ‘could be interesting’ I’ll explain more about this later.

Installation

Before you can purchase Fever you will need to download a small package which will detect if your hosting provider is up to the job. Once your server successfully passes the compatibility tests you will be given an activation key to purchase Fever. Installation is fairly straightforward and there is even a video on feedafever.com showing you the complete install process. You may need to change the permissions of the Fever folder, presumably to allow future updates to be pushed out. Fever refreshes itself automatically, however I did encounter a problem setting up a cron job to refresh my feeds every 15 minutes. The command provided over on feedafever.com didn’t seem to work with my provider (SiteGround) but after a quick email to SiteGround they soon managed to get it working for me.

Setup

Once Fever is installed you will need to bookmark it’s homepage, by default the installation is placed at www.yourwebsite.com/fever/ You can now start to feed Fever with your existing feeds, this is easily achieved by importing the OPML file from your previous reader. There are four sections to Fever, the main section is called ‘Kindling’ this is where you place your ‘must read’ feeds, you can create groups of feeds here and these are read in the traditional way (although by default Fever hides unread counts). Next up are ‘Sparks’, this is where you file all the feeds that can be interesting but are quite high in volume. Link posts and Twitter feeds are ideal candidates to be thrown into the Sparks section as you’ll never be hassled by unread counts. Just toss your feeds into Sparks and forget them. Now here’s where Fever hots up, Sparks and Kindling combine to create the next section called ‘Hot’. Think of Hot as your own personal Digg site.

Fever will analyse all your feeds (Kindling and Sparks) looking for matching links and will pick out the most frequently talked about links. These posts are arranged in order of their ‘Hotness’, giving popular/interesting posts a higher temperature and will place them at the top of the Hot list. It’s all based on body temperature (hence the name Fever) the more popular the posts (based on similar links) the higher the temperature. There is also a ‘Saved’ section where (as you would expect) posts are stored for reading later. At the bottom of the main menu is a search bar for tracking down those lost posts.

Fevers design is simple, minimalistic and well laid out which works really well. Favicons are used to represent the feeds in both the desktop and iPhone versions. Keyboard junkies will love it’s easy to navigate user interface. The arrow keys are used to move from pane to pane and up and down the lists. ‘Space’ will move you to the next post, hitting ‘S’ saves the post for reading later and pressing ‘A’ will mark the selected section as read. To expand a story you hit ‘enter’ and to view the entire post just hit arrow right.

Fluid

Shaun suggests using the site specific browser Fluid.app with Fever and provides a link to a rather nice looking icon and screenshots on how to configure Fluid. Fluid turns Fever into a standalone application complete with an unread dock badge.

iPhone

Fever also works well on the iPhone as a web app, sharing the simple, easy to navigate style of it’s desktop big brother.

A link to the web app can be saved to your iPhone home screen giving the impression of a native app. However it can sometimes take a good ten seconds to open over 3G and when viewing an external site the screen orientation can get a little goofed up, a quick tilt to the left or right soon fixes this though.

Conclusion

Used as just a standard RSS reader Fever works really well, I love the simple interface and easy to remember keyboard navigation shortcut keys. The ‘Hot’ section of Fever is a bonus, a place to find popular stories that you might otherwise have missed. The iPhone app also works really well and as it’s web based it stays perfectly in sync with the desktop.

For the last couple of years I’ve been using Google Reader on the desktop and more recently Byline on the iPhone and although I’d reached my limit of how many feeds I could reasonably get through in any one day I was happy with this setup. After using Fever for just over a week it has completely replaced my old configuration. I use Kindling in the same way I used Google Reader but every now and then I dip into Hot to… well.. see what’s hot!

Having said that the PHP MySQL app is obviously not as fast as a native OS X app such as NetNewsWire and this sometimes shows. Navigating through the pages can sometimes feel a little sluggish but you soon get used to it. It would have been nice to try an online demo installation of Fever before purchasing the app. The iPhone web app could do with a little polish, it sometimes feels a bit beta but I’m sure this will improve as the app matures. In the week that I’ve been using Fever there has been an update pushed which added some extra features and fixed a few bugs, I’m sure Shaun is committed to future updates.

A license for Fever costs $30 which is $30 more than most other readers such as Google Reader and NetNewsWire but I feel if you already have web hosting the great UI and the ‘Hot’ feature is well worth the money.

Dave Day 2009