Do you use a RSS feed reader? I do and I love it because it saves me the hassle of opening up endless URL’s. I like sifting through all my favorite sites fast and RSS provides the best way to do that. Up until now I have been using Google Reader to aggregate and read my daily dose of internet. Google Reader has two advantages that no other RSS reader provides: The endless scroll function and the all items category. I have tried half a dozen Reader programs in search of a proper alternative but each one was missing the two keyfeatures, that I cannot live without. In February though I deleted all of my subscriptions in Google Reader and moved to a RSS reader that has it’s database on my own webserver. I now use ‘fever’.

Before you go and scroogle fever let me tell you this:

1. Fever costs 30$ for one licence
2. you must have a webserver ready and know how to setup a MySQL database
3. and there is no demo version or trial period.

That being said, I think it is worth the money. Fever has a slick interface, runs stable and fast, has a lot of nice features and gives me the certainty that no one else is reading my feeds without my knowledge. My foremost motivation was the privacy factor. I did not want to continue to share my interests with Google not knowing what they are doing with this rather personal knowledge about me. 30 dollars is 30 dollars and I accepted the three points mentioned above gladly for preserving my privacy a little bit more.

I will not cover the initial setup, since the author of fever has prepared a nice website and video tutorial that covers all aspects. I had no trouble installing and paying for fever and it took me roughly 15 minutes until I was up and running. Let me share my user experience with fever instead. Here is what I did after I installed the program successfully:

1. Exported my feeds in OPML format out of Google Reader and imported them in fever
2. Took a look around in fever to get familiar with the settings and menu
3. Estabilished my reading routine in fever
4. Deleted all my subscriptions and tags in Google Reader

Step 1: Export your data

Whether you are using Google Reader or any other feed reader, the software probably supports the OPML format. OPML lets you export and import your subscriptions effortlessly out of one feed reader into another. In the case of Google go and visit your Google Reader settings and navigate to ‘Import/Export’. There you can download your subscriptions as an OPML format. This file is then imported into your feeder reader. The whole process took me two minutes to complete.

Step 2: Get to know fever

The interface of fever is similar to Google Reader and luckily does not resemble an email client like some RSS readers do. The menu and your subscriptions sit on the left with your content on the right. Fever’s layout can be set to fixed or fluid and your subscriptions can hidden from the main view.  The program allows creating categories and comes with four default ones:

• Sparks: All RSS content you mark a sparks lands here. Sparks are considered as “less important” in fever and are not displayed in the main category (kindling), your custom made categories and Hot category
• Saved: All RSS content that you saved gets stored here.
• Kindling: The meta group which acts as the “all items” category. Here all your RSS feeds are accumulated randomly.
• Hot: A collection of RSS articles that appear most frequent. I must say I don’t really get this category and it’s value eludes me.

Step 3: Re – establish a routine.

Needless to say that fever does let me scroll endlessly through my feeds. And in combination with the Kindling category this results in the exact same usability that I had with Google Reader. This does not take into account the recently launched “Play” feature. I only had a brief look at it, but to me it seemed unnecessary. RSS is all about high convenience for me and something like play does not add to my RSS experience. What do you think?
I then went through the settings and set them to my needs. Fever now pretty much felt the same to me as Google Reader which then led me to the last step.

Step 4: Delete your data in Google Reader.

There is not much to say here but two things. First there is no way of deleting your Google Reader account seperately and second all your subscriptions have to be deleted one by one. I grudgingly clicked through my entire list of feeds and cursed Google briefly for not embedding a delete all button.

And thats it. Since then fever has held true and I am glad I switched. I hope this tutorial will help you rid yourself of Google Reader should you feel the urge to do so as I did.