Simon Willison’s Weblog

xmlhack news wire

xmlhack’s “Editor’s Newswire” is interesting. It is a small column (explained here) located on the right hand side of the site that displays the latest XML news snippets “in real time”. The interesting part is how the section is updated—an IRC bot (The Daily Chump Bot, written in Python) monitors a channel for specific commands from authorised users, and produces an XML file of new snippets. Site updates through IRC (or instant messenging services such as MSN or Jabber) is a concept which we could see a lot more of, especially in this age of web services.