Jun
15
2005

RSS Me!

RSS Feeds & Amphetadesk

(Add / View Comments) (0)Wednesday, June 15, 2005 - 11:29:10 pm
(Posted Under: Geek)
The past few nights, as a distraction from work, I've been reminded of how much shit there is on the web. Particularly these new myspace.com type sites. Half cool concept actually, just utterly pointless, and filled with crap from, sorry, losers. Spent - sorry, wasted - some time at some really pathetic blogs too. The patheticness of human kind is somewhat amusing, but largely depressing. No doubt part of the reason for my initial hate of blogs, however, I do now like coming across a good one. Ironically they're typically geek ones. Where geek = software / open source related. Not your Trekie kind of geek!

On the flip side, I've somewhat gotten into RSS feeds - or more correctly, have some RSS feeds worth reading. One thing to take off in the last few years on the Internet as is actually pretty cool and useful are RSS feeds. Now, I'm not into it enough to install a stand alone feedreader, though I have at work - and have played with Thuderbird's one a bit, however, still using Netscape 4 for mail, care factor in using it... However, having a RSS aggregator on my server, which presents a web page rather than a standalone app, bring it on. Time to give Amphetadesk another try.

I'd previously installed this, but I think I gave up on it because of it's lack of Basic Authentication support (the ability to aggregate password protected RSS feeds). A downside when the feeds I want to read are password protected. On giving it another try, I did a search for an auth patch, which I found. While trying to apply it, which didn't go to well - damn Sourceforge - I discovered that what I have installed had the patch all along, I was just too stoopid to work out how to get my username and password sent. (Duh, it's a URL. Usernames and passwords go in the same place as they do any other URL! So simple!) I think anyway, it's been a while since I first installed it, memory is hazzy.

While searching for the patch, I also came across AmphetaOutlines, a set of templates to give Amphetadesk an 'outline' look. That is, rather than displaying all items from a feed in full, displaying them in a more outline look. God, this is good. Possibly the 'full post'-ness of Ampetadesk is another, or even the thing that put me off first time around. This definately makes Amphetadesk a lot more usable.

Of course, it's not perfect, it's a bit of a pain expanding each feed every time you load refresh the page. Or go to the page full stop. I'd prefer if they were expanded by default. Or if you could configure which were expanded and which were compressed by default. The other thing is that clicking an item goes off site. I'd prefer it didn't - hell, that's what I installed a RSS reader to begin with! [wink] I'm sure I can hack the template files to do what I want. I'm definately going to look into it at least.

All pretty cool in anycase.

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