So Wonderfully Dorky

This weekend, I spent probably eight hours making my computer run more happily/quickly/prettily because, well, I'm a dork to the extreme. I got WindowBlinds so I could ape some of the cool glassy effects that Windows Vista is doing and did a couple of other minor things.

But the thing that's really been sticking in my craw as of late had been my extraordinarily lame screen savers. Jealous of my Mac-toting friends, I had found an RSS reader, but that had a pretty inefficient and was making my computer run extraordinarily slow.

So I decided to create my own journalistically-based screen saver. I wanted to make it a pretty visual thing, so I had the idea to base it off of Newseum, which provides 500+ front page images every morning. I almost never have the time to check them, but they are a great way of picking up design ideas. Here, I thought, would be an excellent way to have a geek-chic screen saver that also served a purpose.

That said, Newseum doesn't have an RSS feed, so I had to figure out how to get all of the images. My first thought was to DownThemAll each morning using a Firefox plugin. The problem was, though, that the images on the gallery page of Newseum are quite small--too small to be legible. Thus, I would have had to click and download each page individually every morning. Not fun.

So what I found was an automatic download scheduler which I could program to download any image I wanted. Fortunately, Newseum saves every day's front page image with the same file name to the same URL. Thus, I only had to type in the URLs of each jpeg that I wanted once, set the program up to pull them all down ten minutes after they were uploaded to the site each morning, create a new folder for them all to go to, and direct my Windows photo slideshow screensaver to the folder to pull the photos up.

And the results? Tres magnifique!

(I'm such a dork.)