Deleting Duplicate items in Fever RSS

My Fever RSS setup has a lot of feeds that often duplicate items. There are feeds from news sites such a The Times of India corresponding to National, International and Governmental news as well as feeds from tech sites that often repeat things. The end result is that I often see the same title, the same post and thus repetitive news many times during the day. I found the following script to be an excellent way to remove duplicate items from Fever. This works on the MySQL level and so you should be careful when using it, lest you delete everything because of some coding error on my part (though I’ve checked and this works). Continue reading

A brief update on Fever/AppFog

Recently, AppFog sent out an email telling us that free accounts will be further restricted in what features and resources they are will receive. This felt like a major issue for me at that time, since I have Fever running on the service and I’ve dedicated close to 1 GB of RAM to the app.

When the changes finally made through, I realized that I was wrong. Upon monitoring my Fever installation during updates, I realized that it doesn’t use more than ~150 MB of RAM at a time. The only other thing is the database size, which is more than 300 MB for me, something which cannot be easily hosted anywhere else.

I ran some numbers and have found that the most basic paid plan from AppFog can allow for 8 Fever installs with 256 MB each but with the restriction of 200 MB of database storage per install for $2.5/mo. So, if you can find 7 other people who don’t have more than, say, 300 feeds in their Fever installation, AppFog would be the perfect place for you. It would also be a good way of giving back to the service that has supported free Fever installs for so long.

To everyone else, I must ask this – tell me about your Fever installs. How much are you paying? How much RAM and db are you using? Would you be open to sharing space with me (and possibly others) to reduce hosting costs?

I love Fever. It’s one of those services that are just the perfect fit, in this case for reading RSS feeds. I’m grateful to Shaun Inman for continuously working on this application, even though it seems that new installs are at an all time low and he’s busy with personal stuff. I am ready to pay for the hosting, but I figure that if we work together, we can reduce our costs greatly.

DotIt!

A bookmarklet for importing to DotDotDot –

A few days ago I posted about an up and coming service called DotDotDot that is a great replacement for Instapaper. That day someone posted a link to my blog on HackerNews and my site got 280 hits in a day, a record for my blog… 🙂 Continue reading

Auto-refresh for Fever on AppFog

Today, I got asked something about my “Installing Fever on AppFog” tutorial. Fever has an inbuilt module to refresh your RSS feeds periodically but this module doesn’t work on all types of servers and it certainly doesn’t work on AppFog. Shaun, being the good guy that he is, lists out a way to set up a curl command with a cron job to refresh the feeds automatically. Unfortunately, AppFog doesn’t support crontab directly either. So, I got asked if there’s a solution for this. After a little bit of Googling and finding this solution on stackoverflow, I built up a working solution specific to Fever on Appfog. The detail follows – Continue reading

Pythonista + Fever + Instapaper = Quick RSS Magic

I Love Python. It’s a simple, easy and quick to learn language. Before learning Python, the major language I knew was Java and believe me, that’s a pain! Seeing Python grow from a simple scripting language to a major platform is also a great feeling. The recent awesomeness about Python I discovered was Pythonista for iOS. It’s a wonderful app that allows you to run python scripts of varying complexity on your iPhone or iPad without worrying about silly things like Objective C. Of course, it’s not the perfect app, there are limitations to the libraries and you can’t easily transfer scripts to the app from your desktop. But hey, as long as it’s Python, right? Continue reading

Back to Instapaper

I’ve recently returned to Instapaper.

Why? Because it’s neat. I use Fever exclusively for my RSS consumption but the feed view in Fever is pretty bad. So, almost always, I found myself looking for a way to read interesting articles without visiting their ad-filled websites. Instapaper was embedded in Fever, but I discovered that if I don’t just want to save the article to Instapaper, I want to read it right then, I could easily integrate the “Instapaper Text” bookmarklet into Fever and go from there. Further, Instapaper’s code is smart enough to parse 99% of the sites I want to read cleanly (including, amusingly, Google.com :D)

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Feedafever for ~Free

I’ve been reading Chris Anderson’s “Free” and while I pay for the occasional service or app, my endeavor is to get as much as I can, for free.

Fever, an RSS reader that’s clever, quick and time-saving, is a recent purchase that I’m finding to be just amazing. What’s more amazing is that the product is worth $30 but I found someone who didn’t need it any more so he sold me his activation key for much lower… Continue reading

Feedafever for ~Free

I’ve been reading Chris Anderson’s “Free” and while I pay for the occasional service or app, my endeavor is to get as much as I can, for free.

Fever, an RSS reader that’s clever, quick and time-saving, is a recent purchase that I’m finding to be just amazing. What’s more amazing is that the product is worth $30 but I found someone who didn’t need it any more so he sold me his activation key for much lower…

Anyways, the look and feel of Fever is great and despite the really small app ecosystem, I’m really enjoying the app. The only problem? I’m a fan of RSS and follow just about any blog or feed that I find on the Internet. That’s kind of why I needed Fever – it has features such as sorting the feeds based on their relative “hotness” and presenting it in a very coherent format. But all those feeds being polled so many times were causing a bit of a problem – too much storage and too much bandwidth.

Continue reading