I read macosxhints' rss offering using AmphetaDesk, and if any of the current hints mention Exposé or otherwise use non-ASCII characters, I get an error from AmphetaDesk because of an illegal character in the XML file. I used to go in by hand and delete or modify the illegal character, but I got tired of that, and now I simply run the following script from a Terminal window and reload the browser page, and it works. Note that it changes non-ascii characters to dashes (-). I call the script fixrss.
#!/bin/sh
tr '\200-\377' '-' < $HOME/Applications/amphetadesk-osx-v0.93.1/data/
channels/macosxhints.xml > /tmp/fixrss$$
cp /tmp/fixrss$$ $HOME/Applications/amphetadesk-osx-v0.93.1/data/
channels/macosxhints.xml
rm -f /tmp/fixrss$$
NOTE: The tr and cp lines have been broken into two for narrower display; remove the line break when entering this code.
Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20040625201035434