Apps Spotlight

NewsArt

NewsArt is one of my favourite projects because it takes the live news cycle and slows it down into something visual. It watches RSS feeds, turns headlines into painterly prompts, generates artwork locally, and publishes a simple page that can update itself in the background.

Visit NewsArt live Visit ca.nberra.com live Back to apps

How It Works

From RSS headline to published artwork

The flow is straightforward and nicely hackable: NewsArt reads one or more enabled RSS feeds, picks the next unseen story, optionally pulls article text for extra context, builds a prompt, generates a new image, writes a fresh latest.png and index.html, and can upload the result over FTPS.

The same engine now drives both NewsArt and ca.nberra.com, with separate config, output folders, state files, logs, feeds, and publishing targets.

AI Stack

Local image generation first

The current generator uses diffusers locally, with the default model set to stabilityai/sd-turbo. That keeps the core image generation on the machine rather than depending on a hosted image API.

Prompting

Optional local Ollama rewrite

NewsArt can optionally use local Ollama to turn a dry headline and article extract into a more visual prompt. The configured model is llama3.2:latest, and the system prompt keeps the result short, faithful, and grounded in real art movements.

RSS And Automation

Feeds, scheduling, and publishing

Feeds are defined per site profile, named so the published page can credit the source properly, and filtered against a seen-history list. A PySide6 Windows tray app handles scheduling, status, notifications, and background runs.

Why I Like It

A creative project that is also practical

What makes NewsArt special to me is that it is both experimental and useful. It started as a way to reinterpret headlines as art, but it has grown into a maintainable local publishing system with profile-based sites, configurable styles, a tray controller, and real deployment support.

Live Site

NewsArt is live

The main NewsArt site is live on BillBaud and updates from the real publishing pipeline, not a staged demo page.

Open the live NewsArt site

Live Site

ca.nberra.com is live

The Canberra-focused site is also live, powered by the same engine with its own feed, output folder, state, and publishing settings.

Open the live ca.nberra.com site