Finding More Channels

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.

RSS Auto-Discovery

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:

1. Drag this link to your browser's Links toolbar: Subscribe.
2. Visit any of the following sites that support the <link> tag: LiveJournal, MeerKat, News Is Free, Syndic8
3. Find a channel you like and click the "Subscribe" bookmark you added to your toolbar.

If 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 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 the Radio Userland coffee mug, if that feature is enabled under AmphetaDesk's "My Settings"), simply click the icon when AmphetaDesk is open, and the feed will automatically be subscribed into your "My Channels". DAYPOP Daypop.com "searches 7500 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 search for "perl". 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 will need a fyuze account to access this feature.) 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! If you get a lot of email from mailing lists hosted at Mail-Archive.com, you're in luck. With over 2500 different lists available, simply find the archive page for the discussion in question (like this one) and add maillist.rdf to the URL. The result is an RSS feed for AmphetaDesk. 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 a customized aggregated RSS feed from hundreds of different channels. Moreover is a large provider of hundeds of newsfeeds, all included in the default AmphetaDesk channel list. However, it's possible to search through all the Moreover feeds and return the search results in RSS format. To do so, go to the Moreover homepage, enter your term in the search box you see there and do a normal search. The resultant URL in your address bar is what we want. You're going to see o=portal somewhere in the URL - simply change that to o=rss and insert the URL into AmphetaDesk. 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. Finally, add this URL to AmphetaDesk. 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 walk you through how to verify your feed, and then how to further tweak it to your datagrubbing needs. 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 account to see these buttons.) 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. RacingNewsOnline.com offers the latest news concerning the popular racing sports of NASCAR, CART, Formula One, and more. While they provide their data in an easy-to-use Javascripts for webpages, you can easily subscribe with one of their in-house RSS feeds, customized to your racing desires. Sherch.com Sherch.com gives people the ability to search through various engines and get the results back in an RSS format. This ability is granted via an Apple Computer technology called Sherlock. Simply go to the page, click the "RSS 1.0 Channel" link of the engine you want to search through, and add ?searchterm=[ your search term(s) ] to the URL. Finally, add that channel into AmphetaDesk, and you should be set. (Note: Sherch is a very old service - there's a good chance half of the stuff available is no longer operational.) Snewp.com, from Ticluse Teknologi, is another search engine with a minimal frontend reminiscent of Google. Search for a term, filter out languages or sources you don't want to see (or restrict your search to only title, description, category, or link parsing) and add &display=rss to the final URL. The resultant address is an RSS feed. 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, and much more. 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 for AmphetaDesk would look like this. You can also tweak how many items are displayed by adding &viscount=nn to the URL, where nn is the total count. (Note: Using Yahoo! Groups RSS feeds will only work if the mailing list has publicly available archives.)