Introducing Fever

Fever is a web driven feed reader with a difference. A standard feed reader (like Google Reader) will simply aggregate all the information you have subscribed to. This is perfect if you just subscribe to a few simple blogs, however as soon as you have a large number of feeds, it quickly becomes unmanageable. Fever aims to fix this issue by providing a self contained recommendation engine which allows you to subscribe to more feeds and check them less frequently, without falling behind.

The first thing you need to know about Fever is that it is split in to three main views - Hot, Kindling and Sparks.

The Hot view helps identify links of interest. It works by displaying a temperature gauge that is based upon the optimum human body temperature of 98.6F. A link's temperature is determined by the amount of re-linking and discussion it is generating, which means that important information will automatically bubble to the top. Fever also groups related links and discussions together under the main title to help you follow-up in more depth on a particular topic. If you have been away from the Internet for a while, the Hot view is the perfect area for you to quickly catch up on the most discussed news. The image below shows the Hot view:

The Kindling view is where you keep you must reads. This is where you get the power of a standard feed reader wrapped in an elegant and easy to use user interface. You can categorise your feeds for easy searching, search directly, save individual links, or simply scroll through the most recent un-read links. If you are used to Google Reader and other "standard" feed readers the Kindling view is probably where you will spend most of your time. The image below shows the Kindling view:

The final view is Sparks. This view is for your high volume hit or miss feeds. I tend to drop a lot of world sport feeds into this category, however know that it could very quickly result in overload. All links in Sparks are available exactly like Kindling, although they are hidden away in their own view with only the most discussed Hot news being made obvious. The image below shows the Sparks view:

These three simple views make up how Fever works and when combined with the standard feed functionality and the elegant, finger friendly user interface, it quickly proves itself to be the best on the market.

The only other thing you need to be aware of is that Fever is not a hosted service and therefore requires a server running PHP and MySQL. This can either be your own server, or hosted by a third party such as A Small Orange (my web host of choice). Even though you host Fever yourself, the application has still been designed with ease of setup and maintenance in mind, therefore once installed Fever can automatically update and maintain itself.

If you are in the market for a decent feed reader, or your current reader isn't working out for you, then I would recommend you check out Fever. Yes you will need your own server to host the application, however most "techies" will probably already have access to this. Let me know if you have any questions.