Brian Cantoni

AmphetaDesk Enhancements

AmphetaDesk is a great news aggregator for reading headline feeds from around the web. This page contains a few enhancements or customizations that I’ve made to better suite my own needs. Following the open-source nature of AmphetaDesk itself, all of these are made available publicly as well.

FTPstore and the Template modification both work on top of an existing installation of AmphetaDesk v0.93.1 (the current release). AmphetaMailer is a complete installation of a modified version of AmphetaDesk v0.93.

AmphetaMailer

AmphetaDesk is a great application for keeping up with various news and RSS feeds. Once my list of channels grew to about 50, the standard usage model didn’t work as well for me. With so many channels, it was difficult to find just the newest entries.

In order to solve this problem, I created AmphetaMailer with a couple of key design goals:

  • Send the updates to me via e-mail on a timed schedule. I’m already in e-mail all day so this made sense. Plus, I can catch up on things I missed when I’m away on vacation or whatever.

  • Only send new items once so I don’t need to manually filter through everything I’ve already seen.

  • Use FTPstore method (see below) to use the channel list from a common FTP server location.

Overall, I’m pretty happy with this solution and have been running it on a Win2000 server at home for a few months. Right now it’s running at 0700, 1300 and 1900 each day, dutifully sending me an e-mail message each time. I’d like to turn this project into a public server that people could subscribe to with their own channel list. Setting up something like AmphetaMailer on your own server (along with Perl and all of the required modules) is kind of a pain. A service that people could simple set up through their browser would really lower the barrier to making this useful.

Because this is a major hack of AmphetaDesk, you should install it in a separate location if you’re already using AmphetaDesk interactively. For installation instructions, see the Readme file or download the software itself thing below.

Download AmphetaMailer.zip (ZIP, 12 KB); sample e-mail screenshot (PNG, 49 KB)

FTPstore

I’ve been using AmphetaDesk both at home and at work on a couple of systems. The problem I ran into was trying to keep all of the channels coordinated. For example, if I found a good channel at home, I couldn’t see it at work.

I created a simple modification to AmphetaDesk which uses an FTP server location to store and retrieve the configuration file that holds the channel list. For installation instructions, see the Readme file.

Downloads:

Template

As my collection of news feed channels has grown to pass 30, I wanted a better way to quickly jump between each channel. I made some minor changes to the template file ‘index.html’ which accomplish this with simple “Prev, Home, Next” links. This template also includes a link (for each channel) to the RSS validator web page.

To install, download the Zip file and copy index.html to the Templates folder under your AmphetaDesk location. You should probably make a copy of your existing index.html file first.

Download ADTemplate.zip (ZIP, 3 KB); sample screenshot (PNG, 38 KB)