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June 23, 2009 / Filed under: Fever, RSS, Software, PHP

Shaun Inman's latest gem is called Fever, a self-install RSS reader with some interesting features.

Fever scans your lower priority feeds (ones that update frequently and aren't necessarily life-or-death for you to read), in combination with your high priority feeds (must-reads), and pools together "hot" items.

This allows you to avoid having to scan through multitudes of low-priority feed items, with little-to-no ROI. Your high-priority feeds dictate which low-priority feeds require your attention. This acts as a filter for important and relevant feeds.

Just a regular feed reader

Fever is, by itself, a regular feed reader, which requires your own server to install and interact with. So, even without the "catch features," it could still function as your main feed reader if you wanted.

Fever requires a MySQL database and server that supports PHP, and is licensed per domain.

Advantages to having your feed reader in a local database could be many:

• Perform backups of all of your subscriptions (and subscription items) anytime.
• Write your own code to interact with your Fever data, without relying on confusing API's and third-party servers to distribute the data.

Fever in-depth

Rather than depleting your number of RSS subscriptions in order to make things easier to keep up with, Fever suggests you subscribe to more feeds - the more the merrier! The idea is to subscribe to a lot of low signal-to-noise feeds - feeds that aren't all that important to keep up with on a daily or weekly basis. However, their value still lies in the opinions of the collective mass. Similar to Digg, Fever acts as a ranking system for items that reference the same URL or resource, providing you an overview of popular stories.

So, the more feeds you subscribe to, the more relevant your "hot" items become.

Other subtleties

Fever supports authenticated feeds, which is, by itself, a great feature to have with any feed reader.

I've also noticed the process of "refreshing" the Hot section takes some time, the more feeds you are subscribed to. It must have to scan each feed's items and perform reporting tasks, like grouping together items that are similar. A nice feature, which I believe is available, is to set up a cron job and have Fever scan for "hot" items when you're not even viewing the application! So, each time you check, it should always be relevant - refreshed within the last hour or so.

Ideas on how to use Fever

One idea I had for using Fever effectively was to supply Fever my Twitter timeline RSS feed. This would be the feed for every status update from people I follow. Then, when Fever scans that feed, it should find all tweets that are linking to the same resource, providing an overview of the "hot" items people are talking about!

I could even supply the main RSS feed for all public Twitter users (if that still exists), expanding my use case, and providing more accurate results!

I am not sure if this is working the way I hoped, but it still might be possible with Fever.