Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Tuesday, 18th March 2025

Building and deploying a custom site using GitHub Actions and GitHub Pages. I figured out a minimal example of how to use GitHub Actions to run custom scripts to build a website and then publish that static site to GitHub Pages. I turned the example into a template repository, which should make getting started for a new project extremely quick.

I've needed this for various projects over the years, but today I finally put these notes together while setting up a system for scraping the iNaturalist API for recent sightings of the California Brown Pelican and converting those into an Atom feed that I can subscribe to in NetNewsWire:

Screenshot of a Brown Pelican sighting Atom feed in NetNewsWire showing a list of entries on the left sidebar and detailed view of "Brown Pelican at Art Museum, Isla Vista, CA 93117, USA" on the right with date "MAR 13, 2025 AT 10:40 AM", coordinates "34.4115542997, -119.8500448", and a photo of three brown pelicans in water near a dock with copyright text "(c) Ery, all rights reserved"

I got Claude to write me the script that converts the scraped JSON to atom.

Update: I just found out iNaturalist have their own atom feeds! Here's their own feed of recent Pelican observations.

# 8:17 pm / github-actions, ai-assisted-programming, github, git-scraping, atom, netnewswire, inaturalist

2025 » March

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