I’ve been trying a bunch of different RSS Feed readers, but I think I’ve found the perfect (for me — these things are highly personal) solution. It comes in two parts.

First, get yourself a copy of AmphetaDesk. This is a cross-platform (written in Perl, so it’ll run on Windows, Mac OS 9 or X, Linux…basically anything that’ll run Perl I guess) utility to pull down RSS feeds. It uses your web browser to display the results. It works great! Problem is…it doesn’t look all that hot.

So second, get the bolt-on product, AmphetaFrames. You install it by renaming a directory in your AmphetaDisk install and replacing it with the AmphetaFrames directory. Its painless.

Last note for those of us who use quality browsers (something Mozilla based: Mozilla, FireFox, Camino), you have to make a small hack to a file. (Note that there’s a small typo on that page. In two places you’ll see # print out the http headers. $connection->send_basic_header(); there should be a line break so that $connection starts a new line. This typo is in both the ‘before’ and ‘after’ code segments.)

And voila, a flexible, good looking, free RSS reader that you can use on all your machines. You could even run it on a server and log into it from various places.

Click to see a full-size image.