This article was written in 2009. It might or it might not be outdated. And it could be that the layout breaks. If that’s the case please let me know.

Using Twitter feeds to feed your Fever

Shaun Inman redefined the feed reader with his brilliant application Fever. The best thing about it, apart from the brilliant user interface, the beautiful layout, the usability, the feel of a native app, is the fact that you can actually use high volume feeds without reading them. The idea is that a link gets more interesting when more feeds link to it. So fever has this section called Heat where all these interesting articles are shown.

In order to make this work you need many high volume feeds on the same subject. What better place than Twitter for this purpose? I copypasted/wrote a simple script that finds all URL’s in a twitter feed, follows the 301 or 302 redirects until it gets the 200 header, places this URL in a new feed item.

You’ll need to install this php script somewhere on a server, optionally change some texts around line number 329 and then add this URL as a spark to Fever:

http://yourdomain.com/dir-of-choice/?feed=https://vasilis.nl/nerd/feed/

You should replace https://vasilis.nl/nerd/feed/ with the feed you really want to add.
Now if someone can write a bookmarklet that actually lists all linked feeds in a document and gives you the option to copy them, or directly submit them to fever, I’d be happy to post it here.

Go ahead and laugh at my code, I know it sucks. But let me know how to improve it, I’m willing to learn.