I've Got The Fever!

The fever I have right now is not the kind where my forehead is hot, nope its the kind that speeds up my weblog reading by an amazing amount. FeedAFever.com is an unusual kind of application. It doesn’t run on your desktop computer or your mobile device. Nope, it runs on your webhost. OK, I suppose it can run on your desktop computer if you are running MAMP/XAMP or running a Linux distro that can run a web application that uses Apache, PHP 4.2.3+ and MySQL 3.23+.

Fever is a web based application that takes reading your RSS feeds to a whole new experience plane. Instead of reading post after post like Google Reader or NetNewsWire or “name your favorite RSS feed reader here“, you are presented with articles that have a temperature based on a normal human body temperature of 98.6˚ degrees Fahrenheit or 37˚ Celsius.

What this means is that if you have 300 RSS feeds that you try to read regularly, odds are that 3 or 4 of them will talk about the exact same news that has come up on that day. So instead of having to slog through those multiple posts, Fever sees that they are talking about the same thing and assigns a temperature to the topic. The more sites that you normally follow that talk about it, the “hotter” the article is.

When you go to your installation of Fever to see what’s happening. You will be presented with a list of articles from hottest to coldest as shown on the left (click on the image for a larger view). As you can see, stories like “Ramp Champ” and “Apple Answers the FCC’s Questions” are mentioned my multiple blogs, each listed under the title of the article. You can pick and choose which article you want to read or read multiple articles if you wish. It’s totally up to you.

The way Fever accomplishes this is by the user assigning subscriptions to either the “Kindling” pile or the “Sparks” pile. Fever looks at all the feeds in the “Sparks” list to determine what articles seen in the “Kindling” list are being talked about the most. Even if an article isn’t seen in the Kindling list, it will be assigned a temperature based on how many blogs are linking to the article.

Along with articles displayed by temperature, you can also read your most important blogs as you had in the past by viewing the Kindling. This will give you a display just like what you are used to in your old reader. You can read them all by clicking on the “Kindling” tab, or you can click on the individual blogs/groups to drill down to specific sections.

Kindling is where you put blogs like comics or personal blogs that you want to make sure you read.

To get your feeds from your old reader into Fever, just “export” an OPML file of all your feeds and import them into Fever. Then you need to do a little work and assign blogs to the Sparks list as needed. Once you have established which blogs are Sparks and which are Kindling, you are ready to rock and roll.

Installing Fever is an absolute breeze! You start by creating an account at the feedafever.com site. This doesn’t cost you anything to start with. You download the Fever server compatibility suite (a very small zip file), extract it and upload it to your webhost. Then open your browser to the specified page. This will cause Fever to test your webhost to see if it’s compatible with Fever. After the tests are run and you check out OK, you need to enter your database information (MySQL DB info that you setup on your webhost). If the database checks out too, you will be given a compatibility confirmation code.

At this point, you can purchase Fever if you wish. It’s $30 and let me tell you its well worth every penny! You enter the code into your account at feedafever.com, and you will be sent to PayPal.com to make the purchase. After your purchase is approved, you will be sent an activation key. Head over to your installation of Fever on your webhost, enter the key. At this point, you will be taken to a login page where you enter an email address and password (not the same one you used to create your account on feedafever.com) and you will be sent to a screen where you can drag a bookmarklet for add new subscriptions as well as a button to press to let you import an OPML file you exported from your older reader.

Thats it. Fever will start pulling articles from your subscriptions and before you know it you will be off and running. There is a great demo screen cast on the feedafever.com website that explains how Fever works and demonstrates an installation and purchase.

I have to say that I was skeptical at first, but after watching the screen cast and talking to a friend that had purchased it just a week earlier, I knew this was the way to go for me.

Unfortunately, due to the nature of this web application, its probably very difficult for a “demo” installation to be created. I did find a YouTube video of someone demo-ing Fever. Give that a look after checking out the demo screen cast.

If you use Google Reader or NetNewsWire (the two ways I “used” to follow my feeds), head over to feedafever.com and check out the demo screen cast. I have a feeling you will want to grab a copy yourself.