AmphetaDesk has supported website integration since early 2001, allowing other people to create special links that interact with your locally running copy. These links allow easy addition of single feeds, or mass importing of many feeds. Below, you'll find out how to create these special links for your fellow AmphetaDesk user, allowing visitors to your site an easy way to subscribe to your RSS feed, or even import a list of feeds you're currently reading.
The simplest means of
telling people about your RSS feed is by providing a link to it on your
website, so that visitors can copy and paste the URL from their browser to
their news aggregator. The unspoken standard of doing this is by using the
orange XML icon
(to your right), as in this sample HTML code:
<a href="http://demo.com/rss.xml"><img src="xml.gif" /></a>
With that HTML, AmphetaDesk users could click the XML icon, copy the URL from their browser's address bar, and then paste it into one of the "Add A Channel" boxes within AmphetaDesk. For AmphetaDesk users, a better way exists - one that offers patented One-Click techology (ha, ha). Take a look at the code below, and the matching image:
<a href="http://127.0.0.1:8888/index.html?add_url=http://demo.com/rss.xml&go"> <img src="http://www.disobey.com/amphetadesk/images/xml_pill.gif" /> </a>
The above HTML code creates the icon/link shown to your right, which is the
orange XML combined with the AmphetaDesk pill icon. This signifies that
AmphetaDesk users can merely click that icon and, seconds later, your RSS
feed will automatically be added to their subscription list (if your
AmphetaDesk is currently running, you can try it now).
What are we doing here? We're creating a special link back to the user's locally running installation of AmphetaDesk. 127.0.0.1 is a reference to the local machine (the machine your visitor is sitting in front of), 8888 references the special port that AmphetaDesk runs on and index.html is just the main page of AmphetaDesk. ?add_url= is where the fun begins - it points to the URL for your RSS feed. In the above example, we're saying "hey! automatically add demo.com/rss.xml to the visitors's subscription list" (the &go is ignored and exists only to workaround an Internet Explorer bug).
Obviously, you'd want to replace the sample URL above with one that truly points to your RSS feed. Either way, with a few simple lines of HTML on your page, you've allowed AmphetaDesk readers to easily subscribe to your news feed, garnering you happy visitors with little hassle.
Much like AmphetaDesk allows you to construct a link to a single news feed (above), you can also construct a link to multiple feeds, allow One-Click importing of all your news feeds, lists of sites you're reading right now, Radio Userland importing, and more. If you've read the above documentation, you're halfway there:
<a href="http://127.0.0.1:8888/index.html?add_urls=XMLURL1,XMLURL2&go"> <img src="http://www.disobey.com/amphetadesk/images/xml_pill.gif" /> </a>
In this example, we've comma-spliced multiple URLs (XMLURL1 and XMLURL2
would be two different XML URLs, but were shortened in this example for
readability). You can add as many URLs as you want, as long as they're fully
qualified (ie. begin with "http://") and are comma seperated. To see this in
action, click the ittle pill icon on your right - it'll automatically add
three feeds created by the developer of AmphetaDesk.
Above, I showed you how to allow someone to add multiple URLs to their AmphetaDesk reading list. However, it can quickly get unwieldy, as adding more than five feeds creates a monstrous URL indeed. It's easily possible, however, to allow an AmphetaDesk user to import large numbers of feeds with a single click. The secret is called an OPML file.
If you're an AmphetaDesk, Radio Userland, Aggie, or NetNewsWire Lite user, all your RSS subscriptions are stored within an OPML file. In AmphetaDesk, this file is located under the user's "data" directory and is called "myChannels.opml". These OPML files are the secrets to mass importing. If you upload your OPML file to your website, you can use that file as an XML URL for feeding to ?add_url:
<a href="http://127.0.0.1:8888/index.html?add_url=http://demo.com/myChannels.opml&go"> <img src="http://www.disobey.com/amphetadesk/images/xml_pill.gif" /> </a>
When an AmphetaDesk user clicks the icon, all the feeds located in the OPML file will be imported into their subscription list, allowing a quick and easy method of saying "hey! this is what I'm reading!" or "these are the best gardening feeds I know of". Even more powerful is that you can combine multiple OPML files with normal XML URLs (above), creating imports that bring together your personal reading list, feeds you've created, or others with OPML or RSS files available:
<a href="http://127.0.0.1:8888/index.html?add_urls=XMLURL1,OPMLURL,XMLURL2&go"> <img src="http://www.disobey.com/amphetadesk/images/xml_pill.gif" /> </a>
