Simon Willison’s Weblog

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:

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.

# 18th March 2025, 8:17 pm / github-actions, ai-assisted-programming, github, git-scraping, atom, netnewswire, inaturalist

Footnotes that work in RSS readers. Chris Coyier explained the mechanism used by Feedbin to render custom footnotes back in 2019.

I stumbled upon this after I spotted an inline footnote rendered in NetNewsWire the other day (from this post by Drew Breunig):

Since feed readers generally strip JavaScript and CSS and only allow a subset of HTML tags I was intrigued to figure out how that worked.

I found this code in the NetNewsWire source (it's MIT licensed) which runs against elements matching this CSS selector:

sup > a[href*='#fn'], sup > div > a[href*='#fn']

So any link with an href attribute containing #fn that is a child of a <sup> (superscript) element.

In Drew's post the HTML looks like this:

<!-- Footnote link: -->
<sup id="fnref:precision" role="doc-noteref">
  <a href="#fn:precision" class="footnote" rel="footnote">1</a>
</sup>
<!-- Then at the bottom: -->
<div class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
  <ol>
    <li id="fn:precision" role="doc-endnote">
      <p>This is the footnote.
        <a href="#fnref:precision" class="reversefootnote" role="doc-backlink">&#8617;</a>
      </p>
    </li>
  </ol>
</div>

Where did this convention come from? It doesn't seem to be part of any specific standard. Chris linked to www.bigfootjs.com (no longer resolving) which was the site for the bigfoot.js jQuery plugin, so my best guess is the convention came from that.

# 1st August 2024, 9:57 pm / atom, jquery, rss, netnewswire

On the design of the first-run assistant. NetNewsWire’s Brent Simmons explains the in-depth thinking behind the new first-run assistant.

# 29th January 2008, 12:16 pm / usability, netnewswire, brent-simmons

NetNewsWire 2.0b3 and MarsEdit public betas. Plenty of new features, free upgrades for registered users.

# 22nd September 2004, 4:13 am / netnewswire