Peeriodicals

About a year and a half ago, shortly after releasing Mint 2, I had a stats-inspired epiphany: What if, instead of mentally processing hundreds of headlines your feed reader did that heavy—we’re talking pre-coffee—lifting and just told you what everyone was collectively talking about? And what if it weighted those “hot” topics and aggregated the ensuing discussions in your feeds together?

You could check in once a day—once a week even—and not miss a beat. You could follow new feeds with abandon, the more you fed it, the more effective it would get. Like a personalized, passive Digg catering to your unique interests.

That’s Fever in a nutshell. For more details check out feedafever.com and don’t miss the screencast (those 5 minutes consumed 48 excruciating hours of my life).

The Village

It’s true what they say, it takes a village to raise a child and Fever wouldn’t exist in its current form without the timely input of a handful of generous and insightful beta testers. We built this city.

The Switch

First things first, move or copy your sign-up form and all support files into the new temporary directory. I use /ingsoon/ which uses the TLD to spell out “Coming Soon.” Make sure to update any non-relative paths that may have changed including paths to stylesheets, images and JavaScript.

Next add the following to an .htaccess file in /ingsoon/ and any other directory that you want to remain accessible to others (eg. your Mint installation):

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
    RewriteEngine   off
</IfModule>

Then add the following to your root .htaccess file, changing the IP address to your own (don’t forget to escape the dots with a backslash):

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
    RewriteEngine   on

    # Coming Soon redirect
    RewriteCond     %{REMOTE_ADDR}      !^(192\.168\.1\.101)$
    RewriteRule     .* /ingsoon/ [R,L]
</IfModule>

Lastly, update your Campaign Monitor settings to reflect the new path. Go to “Manage Subscribers,” then click on the list associated with your sign-up form. In the sidebar under “Capturing and Processing” you need to update the path in both “Customize subscribe process” and “Unsubscribe settings.”

Now get back to work, you’re so close!