More RSS News Options: Radio Userland and AmphetaDesk

Why do I keep running my mouth about RSS? Because it's an easy way to get formatted, up-to-date headlines from lots of resources. Because it's easy for anyone to syndicate their headlines using RSS. And because now there are two more options for reading headlines: Radio Userland and AmphetaDesk. 

(If you're a new reader and you don't know what RSS is, please see the following article collection: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/rss/2000/03/17/about_meerkat.html . That should help you out.) 

Why do you need a separate program to read RSS files? Well, strictly speaking, you don't. If you have lots of time and don't mind reading past the XML, you can visit the RSS file page of every news site in which you're interested and find out the latest news that way. 
Or you can get one of these two programs. They go out, "scrape" the RSS files in which you're interested, format them so they're easily read by humans, and present them to you in your browser. The two programs look similar, but they do different things and I suspect they'll go off in different directions. 

The more powerful of the two is Radio Userland, which you can download (it's currently free) at http://radio.userland.com/ . 

Now, if you are like me, the first paragraph of the Userland page will intimidate your socks off. Be not intimidated. This is what you need to know: Radio Userland provides a nice interface for reading RSS files from lots of different resources. In addition, Radio Userland also offers you a way to create and administer a Weblog (blog) from within its interface. I only used this feature briefly, but I quite enjoyed it. I think if I had a couple of hours to really get the hang of it, I could migrate my blog from Blogger to this interface. I'm only scraping the surface with this description of Radio Userland; there's a lot here to see. 

AmphetaDesk is a more limited program, available at http://www.disobey.com/amphetadesk/ . AmphetaDesk, at its current release (0.23, but I've found it very stable) reads RSS files, and presents them in your browser. It does not allow you to create a blog. It is not a server like Userland. Morbus, creator of the program, happily admits that he was inspired by Radio Userland, but he seems more oriented to gathering content and uninterested in having his program act as a server. 

I have been using AmphetaDesk for several weeks now and I really like it (I was asked not to talk about it until now.) However, the server/blog capabilities of Radio Userland are intriguing in a "hey, I never thought of that," make your head pound kind of way. I can't decide. If you're at all interested in reading news syndicated via RSS, I recommend you try both. 

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