Last week I attended New Adventures in Web Design 2011, and I wanted to write a few thoughts about the day. Instead of a blow-by-blow account I’m going to share what I thought made this conference so special, and why I will be attending again. The photos used in this post are all from the Flickr group pool.

The Location

Nottingham is a university city with a vibrant creative community but most importantly it’s located in Central England. This means that those of us who don’t live in the south-east are able to attend without take a week off work and learning what an Oyster card is. It’s also got the East Midlands airport nearby, meaning international attendees are accounted for too.

The Venue

The Albert Hall is a spectacular venue. I heard it criticised by a few for the size of the foyer area during breaks, but I liked that you were elbow to elbow with web geeks. I attended alone, but managed to speak to loads of great people because, in most part, we were forced together in the cosy foyer.

The Talks

Throughout all of the talks I didn’t see one line of code. I don’t go to a conference to learn specifics and take diligent notes, I go to be influenced and inspired by industry leaders. Talks were time-boxed to just 30 minutes, meaning they were lean, focused, efficient and left me wanting more.

The Community

Both before and after the event it felt like the whole web design community had been talking about this conference. Simon Collison is a prominent member of the web design community and we all wanted to see him succeed. While there, everyone from the attendees and volunteers to the speakers were approachable, friendly and always smiling.

Podcasts have become a staple of my weekly routine, I find they are the best way to use those hours of the day I spend travelling to work, driving or doing household chores to do something positive.

I listen to a wide range of podcasts and below is a small list of some of my favourites:

Web Industry

Boagworld: An excellent podcast for anyone “designing, developing or running websites on a daily basis”. It is about to go through a big format change but the 200+ show archive is still available.

Think Vitamin Radio: A bi-weekly podcast from the guys at Carsonified delivering industry news, interviews and case studies. They cover everything from web design to web business so most people will find something of interest

The Big Web Show: Industry veterans Dan Benjamin and Jeffrey Zeldman interview a different guest each week, topics range from web standards to the publishing industry. I’ve found this show so interesting, particularly when they discuss the historical web industry.

General Interest

Stuff You Should Know: Howstuffworks.com‘s flagship podcast. Josh Clark and Charles W. ‘Chuckers’ Bryant walk you through some well chosen topics and themes.

This American Life: If you are going to pick one podcast make sure this is it. Absolutely fascinating topics, brilliantly produced and it’s impossible not to like the host Ira Glass.

Radiolab: This popular science podcast is terrifically produced and the topics and themes are riveting. One of my favourites, full length shows are infrequent but when they publish them they are pure gold.

Answer Me This: Very British, a new one for me although it’s been going for ages. Helen, Olly and Martin the sound man answer listener questions. Very funny and really easy to listen to.

Bonus – Gaming

Gaming podcasts are a guilty pleasure for me, although I can’t file them under passive learning.

Bombcast: A weekly podcast from the guys at giantbomb.com. They are all veterans of videogame journalism and really know their stuff, one of my week’s highlights.

Got any shows to recommend? Let me know in the comments.

It’s not all great though, as it turns out there is no way to transfer an app purchase to the new app store, meaning you miss out on auto updates and other benefits unless you repurchase the license. So the iLife 11 upgrade I bought in October will have to stay in application limbo until the next paid-for upgrade.

As has become the usual from Apple, bittersweet.

I stumbled across Fever while aimlessly web browsing one day, I am familiar with Shaun Inman and the acclaimed analytics package Mint and I had not long acquired a new web host so I decided to throw $30 (£18) at it and give it a go.

What is Fever?

Fever is a self hosted RSS reader with a twist. Once you have loaded it with RSS feeds it performs some clever aggregation and gives you your feeds sorted by temperature.

How it works

Fever gives you multiple choices when adding an RSS feed. The feeds you read every day get marked as ‘kindling’, other feeds of the kind that you may not want to read as consistently get marked as ‘sparks’. For example I have a feed from Smashing Magazine which I read daily so I’ve marked that as kindling, whereas the feed from Digg’s technology section that is not always going to contain stuff I want to read gets added as a spark. When an item appears in one or more kindling feeds and also one or more spark feeds the temperature of the item is raised.

What you end up with is a chart of the hottest items by week (this is the default but you can change the timeframe). This is great for those busy periods when you can’t read your feeds all day long, you can get a good overview of the most talked about things. Fever still functions like a traditional RSS reader if you are into that kind of thing, and it allows grouping of feeds and saving so you can categorise feeds however you like and save RSS items you want to remain in your feed.

The roof is on fire

When I first installed Fever I had somewhere between 65 and 70 feeds to add, over the next few days I got the bug and went feed hunting, I used my Twitter following list, anything I could get my hands on. The great thing about Fever is if you aren’t sure about a feed you just mark it as a spark and you don’t have to read it, it just makes the whole program work better. Imagine that, an RSS feed reader that work better the more feeds you throw at it.

The downside?

Because Fever is a self-hosted service you need a web server (not IIS), with PHP and MySQL. If you are familiar with the above technologies then installation shouldn’t cause you too much trouble, if you aren’t though you may struggle as you have to do some fairly low level stuff to prepare your server for deployment, such as creating a database and setting up a user and the installation notes don’t exactly walk you through the process.

Fever will use your server’s bandwidth and CPU time so if you are on a cheaper, limited hosting plan you will want to keep an eye on it. You can configure Fever to update via cron jobs to limit this. It’s not a bandwidth hog or anything but if you regularly run at the red line you’ll notice.

What are you waiting for?

If you only want an RSS reader to manage 10 or so feeds then maybe Fever isn’t for you. If, like me, you have a lot of feeds to manage and traditional RSS feed readers don’t quite cut the mustard then I wholly recommend you check Fever out, it has completely changed the way I read on the web and has actually allowed me to do much more reading than back when I was wrestling with 65 tabs. Since installing Fever I have doubled my subscribed feeds and I’m far less afraid of adding more to the reading list. While I’m not saying it will work for everyone, it has worked for me after many years of trying to crowbar passive RSS into my daily routine.