I’m back on Fever. Years ago, I installed Shaun Inman’s RSS aggregator and reader because I was looking for a way to deal with my sprawling RSS list. Fever’s novel approach promised to show me the most interesting stuff by letting me see the stuff that was being most talked about by people whose opinions mattered to me. I liked the interface, but when the iPad came out, I wanted something that felt more natual on the iPad. As soon as Reeder came out for iOS, I jumped ship to the Google Reader + Reeder bandwagon.
Fever has gotten so much better than when I last looked at it. Its iPad view is vastly more usable than I remember, and the ability to do feed refreshes through a crontab entry on your server is a pretty solid solution. Of course you still have the option to also refresh your feeds when you load the Fever page, so it feels like your feeds are always up-to-date.
It’s also a lot more clear, now, how to use Sparks. I spent the last few years culling my RSS subscriptions. I eliminated nearly every high-volume site, and kept only a handful of feeds from people whose every word I wanted to read. I’m now going back and re-subscribing to a handful of high-volume sites, specifically to use them as Sparks[1].
I’ll probably have more to say about it after I’ve gotten a few days to use it again. But, I’m really excited about it at the moment.
This is definitely going to be a balance that will take a while to get right. I’ve noticed that adding the RSS feed from Pinboard’s Popular Page can create a lot of duplicate entries in my “Hot” view. I’ve done zero research on this, though. ↩