Fever
April 26th, 2010
Recently I decided to switch from Google Reader to Fever. This switch was made partly because of my growing amount of RSS feeds that I had to read though and also the user interface of fever looked amazing.
What is fever?
Fever is a host-it-yourself RSS application that features many useful features like a ‘hot view’ that calculates the most used links in your feeds and posts the according to temperature starting with a base of 98.5. This view is great if you have many feeds that all have similar content (say a bunch of CSS tip sites or car sites et ceta).
The other two views are Kindling and Sparks. Kindling is similar to Google Reader or any other reader where it is a listing of posts that you can assign to categories and flip though using the spacebar. Sparks though are interesting where it is a place where you can put the feeds that put out alot of posts like Designfloat or Digg. These feeds than can in turn affect the ‘hot view’ by making the links in these post show up more frequently.
Save and chill!
The last view to cover is the ‘Saved’ view where you can save the posts of note to read another time by clicking on the little circle next to the title that turns into a plus symbol. You can than see all your saved posts in clicking the ‘saved’ button in the main toolbar, and delete them the same clicking the minus button by the post title.
One free mac add-on the makes fever worth it is Chill Pill by Conceited Software. This application makes use of fever by placing the application in it’s own window (making all the links you click open the in your default browser) and adding simple things like keyboard shortcuts , themes, integrated system-wide support and more.
So where can I get it?
You can get fever over at feedafever.com, the application costs $30, and is tied to one domain (you have to host fever on your own hosted account). Before you pay though you can download the files and the application will check compatibility and if it checks out okay you will be directed to fever to pay for the app.
I personally was weary of fever at first thinking “great, another RSS app…” but after using it for about a month now I thing that it is worthy of it’s calling: making RSS usable for busy people.