Fever Feed Reader Review
Last week I purchased Fever, a brand new RSS feed reader application created by Shaun Inman (who also created Mint, a popular web analytics package.) Fever is a self-hosted, PHP/MySQL application with a $30 price tag. Not a combo that will find a very large demographic, but I imagine there are quite a few RSS addicts who are comfortable with hosting their own apps, like myself, that Shaun will likely have enough customers for his one-man operation. After all, Mint is a similar setup and that has been pretty successful.
What intrigued me about Fever was the ‘Hot’ feature, which analyzes the content and links in your feeds to put together a list of ‘not-to-be-missed’ stories, weighted and displayed by temperature (‘fever’, get it?!) The higher the temperature, the more links and buzz a subject has in your feeds. And this feature is supposed to work better as you subscribe to more feeds — so no more “I subscribed to it, but don’t have time to read all the news (even though it’s probably really important and I should)” guilt. Huffington Post, I’m looking mainly at you! That also means no more declaring feed bankruptcy (hitting ‘mark as read’ when your unread items count is very overwhelming) — I can just move those feeds to the Sparks section. Just the thought of a program aggregating news and lifting the important things to the top sold me on the app. I had to try it out.
So how does this all work? Well, Fever at the core is a standard RSS reader. You import your feeds, the program polls for updates, and serves them up to you in your web browser. What makes Fever unique is how you organize the feeds (and what that organization does), not to mention the clean beauty of the UI.
There are two main areas for your feeds:
- Kindling, which is where you put all your ‘must read’ feeds.
- Sparks, which is the non-essential stuff you don’t necessarily have to read, as Fever takes the links and content from these feeds and uses that data, in addition to your Kindling, to come up with the best of the best for your Hot section. No unread count either, so just throw your feeds in there and let Fever do it’s magic. This section is perfect for link blogs, those sites that regurgitate stories from other top blogs day(s) later (but occasionally post interesting stuff), and news sites that post a bazillion items a day.
That brings me to Hot. Not only does Fever do everything I mentioned above, but it can do it for pretty much any time frame you want. So, if you miss a week of feed reading because of vacation, just open up Fever and select a weeks worth of feeds, starting now. Fever will pull up the hottest stories from the last week, based on your feeds. (In this case you can see why subscribing to more feeds will give you better results.) No reading through hundreds of posts or just marking all as read to start fresh. You get all the good stuff in a fraction of the time.
So what else?
Did I mention it’s beautiful? (See the screenshots.) It also pulls in the favicons from all the sites, so it makes scanning sources a lot easier.
Did I mention it was super easy to install? Like Wordpress easy (maybe easier!) Or that the software gets updated automatically?
Or that you can blacklist domains to block ad spam?
Not to mention all the standard feed reader features: OPML import/export, groups, search, saved items, and easy keyboard shortcuts.
OK. So that sounds great. Is this just a puff piece? Well, no. Here are the negatives…
- It can be slow. Maybe it’s my hosting (Dreamhost. Eck!) package, but at times the app runs slow. Generally it is decent to good, though.
- ‘Hot’ works, but sometimes not all that well. I’ve seen articles linked with pretty bad titles (i.e. ‘the following statement’), which gives me no clue what the story is… and I’ve also seen a topic grouped together multiple times, with different sources in the groups, all due to slightly different wording. For example, prominent Washington Post columnist Dan Froomkin was fired recently. The topic showed up multiple times in ‘Hot’ because certain outlets described it differently. Would be nice if Fever knew those articles were on the same topic and grouped them all together, so I could see all of the coverage on Froomkin at one time. (I’m sure Fever would have rated the story higher if they were linked too.)
- Occasionally, items spontaneously expand from excerpt to full article as I am scrolling through items. Not the worst thing in the world, but if it’s a long article it can throw you off pretty good.
- Hitting the right arrow while on a new items takes you to the post in your browser. But it also opens up another instance of Fever too, which is kind of annoying. (I am using a Fluid site-specific browser instance of Fever, so maybe that is causing the problem.)
That’s all I’ve found so far. I believe version 1.01 is coming out soon, so we’ll see how much things improve with that and future patches.
Overall, I am very pleased with my purchase. I was a die hard Google Reader user, but I do really enjoy having my reader and the data on my own domain… not to mention a growing confidence in not having to read everything in my feed inbox. I can just sit back and let Fever do the the heavy lifting, while I enjoy reading the most important news of the day.
