I am not the type of person that wants to wait until July 1, 2013 to find a new solution for collecting RSS feeds. So, I’ve started looking around the net for another solution that I can jump on now so I can bid an early goodbye to Reader.
One massive problem: I cannot find one that suits me well.
I used to use Netvibes, and I’m not really trying to go back to that solution. I’ve tried Pulse and while I found the look of it very attractive, it doesn’t have enough utilitarian prowess to blow through a bunch of crap I’m not interested in.
The one solution that I think I like is fever. You should watch the video on the fever page, it’s a really neat idea. It’s also a self-hosted option. Fever has a $30 dollar price tag (not the end of the world), but I have a couple of non-monetary reservations:
- The installation tutorial video says you must install the files to the root of your server. I tried installing the “compatibility checker” in a sub-directory and it worked fine…so…
- The video also states that you need to set the folder to have 777 permissions. This is a cardinal sin. However, the “compatibility checker” said everything was fine with more conventional and safer permissions. So, now I have a couple of questions. I could just email the developer, BUT…
- The developer of fever posted this article which states:
I am working on Retro Game Crunch full-time (okay, overtime) for at least the first six months of 2013. My Mint and Fever support inboxes were already backed up before today’s announcement.
If you read the entire blog post, it’s almost like the developer is telling people really think before buying my software. I don’t find this very reassuring at all.
I will continue to look for solutions to Google Reader. And I still don’t plan waiting until July 2013 to bail on the service.
UPDATE: I found the changelog for Fever and it looks the developer has pushed updates as recently as last month. This makes me feel much better about purchasing the software.