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.

• make the design clean as possible
• make the text clear and readable
• lighten up the design (this was my main goal)
• use wordpress to power the site

Why WordPress?

The main reason for the new design was to switch my blog over from rapidweaver to wordpress. I have been using rapidweaver for about two to three years now to power my blog while creating the rest of the pages in Dreamweaver. While I have been meaning for sometime now to bring all the pages together in wordpress I just didn’t have the time to port everything over to wordpress. Finally when rapidweaver would not accept my serial for some odd reason I thought it was time to switch.

Design, Code, Repeat.

One of my biggest dislikes from my previous design was how dark the whole site was, so that was the first thing I fixed. I redid the whole color scheme using white and green instead of red and black to give the whole site a lighter and more informal feel. Also my old design always felt really cramped so I originally decided to widen the whole page out and use tons of whitespace, that just didn’t feel right. So I compromised with a little bit more space in between the text and the border. The final big change was I decided to use as much CSS3 as possible, the reason for this was: one – it makes the whole site forward looking, unlike like alot of sites that still cater to older browsers and two – it was easier to use than many popular hacks, and does not require javascript to work.

Future Bound…

There are still some ideas that I would still love to play around with someday as well some surprises planed. As far as some topics I would like to cover in the near future are:

• fever
• PHP using Dreamweaver and WebAssist
• Photoshop tips
• Possible Q&A

Also if you have any questions or found any pesky bugs that are still around feel free to email me.

So what is ‘wireframing’ and does Photoshop count as wireframing?

According to Wikipedia the definition of wireframing is:

A website wireframe… is a basic visual guide used in interface design to suggest the structure of a website and relationships between its pages.

My definition is anything that is created to show the interface of each page the site before the coding. What I mean by this is that Photoshop (unless using tons of layer comps, or multiple documents) is not really designed to layout every page of a website, instead it allows you to create just one general design. Fireworks on the other hand though allows you to use the pages pane to layout changes to ever page.

So to the point, should or shouldn’t I use a wireframe?

It is really up to you, personally I am for it, but as i have learned over the years is each designer has his own set of tools and opinions on each one of those tools. Personally I would highly recommend using a wireframe tool for your site but in the end it is really up to you.

Setup

It’s very easy to create this small shortcut. Just go to the System Preferences (the icon with all the gears), click “Keyboard and Mouse”, then click the tab “Keyboard Shortcuts”. Next click on the plus symbol under the shortcut list, and a dialog box should appear. Chose “Other…” (the very bottom option on the list) an open dialog box appears go to your “Applications” folder, find Safari and than click add. Next under “Menu Title” enter “Merge All Windows” (it must be typed exactly that way for for this trick to work) than for the Keyboard Shortcut type any combination of key (like mine is command + option + m) and presto your shortcut should appear next to “Merge All Windows” under the “Window” menu. Now the next time you want to merge your window you have a simple keyboard shortcut that should save you loads of time and space.

This lead me into thinking about all the website redesigns I have done lately and how much I (or maybe you might have) have stressed over W3C’s approval of the website. Yes if you can pull it off it can be a very strong and convincing selling point to a technical client or a under designer because it shows your attention to details and people with special needs (screen readers, high contrast screens etc). Although because we don’t live in a perfect world and not every browser out there (most noticeably Microsoft Internet Explorer) follows W3′s example of compatibility to the word, which forces many designers into dilemmas that more times than not cause the website to have invalid code. One thing this article says though is that unless you have a very technical audience (which most of us do not) more likely than not that they are not going to care about validation, just that the text is readable and good. Just food for thought.