AmphetaDesk is made possible by a syndication format called RSS. In simple terms, there are thousands of web sites that are actively providing their news and headlines in a format AmphetaDesk can understand. And while AmphetaDesk knows about a good number of these sites, it'd be impossible to hunt down each and every single possibility.
So, this page is here to teach you how to fish. Below, you'll find various sites that provide large numbers of channels or methods for inserting into AmphetaDesk. To add them, find a channel you like, copy the modified URL, and enter it into the box on the "Add A Channel" page of AmphetaDesk. AmphetaDesk will figure out the rest.
With recent advancements in the syndication community, adding new feeds to your AmphetaDesk is even easier than the "hunt and peck" behavior we've outlined below. The technology is called "RSS Auto-Discovery", and the relevant implementation notes are outlined here and further clarified. If you don't care what all this means, that's quite all right.
Here's what you do to take advantage of the feature:
<link> tag:
LiveJournal,
MeerKat,
News Is Free,
Syndic8If there's an RSS feed to be had, clicking the "Subscribe" bookmark will automatically add the feed to your "My Channels" within AmphetaDesk. And don't think that the site's we've listed above are the only places you can use this "Auto-Discovery" technology. Many developers have added this feature to their software - there's a good chance that if you see a site with an orange XML icon (below), you'll be able to use your "Subscribe" bookmark to easily add them to your AmphetaDesk.
| Iconic Joy | Description |
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The orange XML icon signifies that the site produces their content in a format that AmphetaDesk can understand. Click the icon, grab the URL from your address bar and insert it into AmphetaDesk. Otherwise, if you see an XML icon with the AmphetaDesk pill (or coffee mug, if that feature is enabled under "My Settings"), simply click the icon and you'll be subscribed. |
| DAYPOP | Daypop.com searches "News Sites and Weblogs for Current Events and Breaking News". You can get any search result in RSS by adding &o=rss to the end of the search URL, like this. |
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Fyuze.com is a web-based aggregator, much like NewsIsFree.com (below), with the added ability of being able to comment on displayed items. Like most collections of news, you can search through fyuze and receive an RSS feed in return. More information is available in the fyuze API. (Note: You'll need a fyuze account.) |
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LiveJournal is a free service that lets anyone keep an online journal, readable to anyone who happens by and updated whenever you deem necessary. Your journal can also be retrieved in RSS format, simply by adding /rss to the end of your journal's standard URL (like this). That's over 500,000 journals available for reading within AmphetaDesk. Wow! |
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If you get a lot of email from mailing lists hosted at Mail-Archive, you're in luck. With over 2500 different lists available, simply find the archive page for the discussion in question (example) and add maillist.rdf to the URL (like this). |
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myRSS enables anyone to build custom RSS feeds for virtually any news site they desire and requires no programming experience. myRSS is completely automated and all channels are available for free public usage. Not only do they provide a handy end-user service for sites that don't currently support RSS, they also include the AmphetaDesk pill icon for immediate one-click subscriptions. |
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Meerkat, from the popular O'Reilly Network, acts as an "aggregator for computer / geek / science-related content" and allows export to RSS. By customizing the very powerful Open Service API, you can make an aggregated RSS feed from hundreds of channels. |
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Network 54 is a large collection of publically accessible forums and bulletin boards, devoted to entertainment, sports, gaming, society and more. Nearly every page of every forum can be received in RSS format. Simply browse to the forum you want to monitor and add ;xml=rss to the end of the URL. |
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Network World Fusion's Do-It-Yourself RSS Feed gives you the ability to get breaking news, reviews, columns and features, customized to your preferred search term. They'll walk you through how to verify your feed, and then how to further tweak. |
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NewsIsFree.com provides a number of custom RSS feeds from sites that don't normally produce their own. Happily, NewsIsFree.com and AmphetaDesk work together quite nicely - hunt down the channel you're interested in, click on it's title, and you'll see an AmphetaDesk button in the sidebar. Simply click that button and AmphetaDesk will add the feed automatically (Note: You will need to be logged into a NewsIsFree.com.) |
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QuickTopic.com provides extremely easy single-topic Web discussion forums that are fully e-mail enabled. Participants can receive and post via e-mail, making it a powerful extension of e-mail for group interaction on any topic. Additionally, any topic can be turned into an RSS feed by adding .rss to the topic's address, as demonstrated with this URL. |
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Syndic8.com is a rather large collection of RSS feeds, which is used internally within AmphetaDesk's "Add a Channel" pages. By signing up for an account, you can suggest new feeds you know of (or even sites you wish had one), search through the master feed database, create personal lists which other people can view, etc. |
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Have a favorite Yahoo! Groups mailing list that you love to read or monitor? Now you can add them into AmphetaDesk for reading with the rest of your news! All you need to know is the name of the group you want to monitor. If the group name is "rss-dev", then your URL would look like this. You can also tweak how many items are displayed by adding &viscount=nn to the URL, where nn is the count. (Note: Using Yahoo! Groups RSS will only work if the mailing list has publicly available archives.) |