If you read this blog at all you know I am not at all happy with the closing of Google Reader, and have been searching for an alternative that I am happy with. So far a combination of Feedly and Pinboard seems the best solution, but I really want to be able to keep using Reeder on my iPad, and the iPhone version is able to work with FeedAFever, a personal server based solution, so I have decided to give it a try.
Fever is a web based solution that you install on your web server. It is a fairly painless process, though it did require a bit of fiddling with server settings (had to move to a newer version of PHP), and then a $30 purchase to activate it.
After that the import of my exported google RSS feeds was easy, and only took a few hours. And all my feeds and groups came over intact, and it does work fairly well. I do have say the refresh on it is interminably slow though. I am on bluehost and have never had an issue with my sites, but I don’t have a dedicated server, and when I click to refresh, it seems to take forever! And I am talking over an hour with over 1000 feeds, and that is just way to slow, though you can keep using it while it refreshes.
The web app is very usable, with easy drag and drop. And you can add 4 different share links (though I have not figured one out to share with facebook, but have gotten e-mail, pinboard and Twitter working fine), though I would like to have those as individual buttons instead of a drop down menu (but the keyboard shortcuts make up for this on a desktop, but not on iOS).
The iOS version works fairly well and has a specific interface, though I don’t like how the only way to refresh is to refresh the browser, which takes forever. And it really isn’t as functional as the full web version, but is much better than the iPad version, which while it has some more features, seems buggy and not great.
On the iOS I would recommend using the excellent Reeder, though it doesn’t help with the slow refresh times.
Of course the big feature of Fever˚ is the Hot list, which takes your RSS feeds, and then you can add other feeds, which you don’t read much to it’s Sparks setting, and it will give you the hottest links in your RSS feeds based on what is trending in the other links. So far it seems to work as advertised, though I tend to like to read all the news on my own, so I am not sure how much I will use this feature, but it is a pretty cool feature. I will add some more feeds to Spark and see what happens, but will have to report more in the future.
It has a blacklist to keep things out of the list as well, though it should be easier to use, like I would like to be able to keep whole groups out of the feature, and you have to enter URL’s individually.
Overall a very impressive program and I will continue to play with it, though the refresh time may be the thing that drives me someplace else.