Creating a RSS Feed based Windows Theme Background Slideshow

The Sean Blog - Dynamic Desktop Wallpapers from RSS Feeds

“I was listening to Windows Weekly on my Zune this morning, and Paul’s Pick of the Week was the Bing Dynamic Theme, which dynamically displays new photos from Bing as your desktop background.   Awesome… this is just like Webshots back in the day! (Errr… I guess they are still around at http://www.webshots.com/.  We’ll use that information in a second.)

When downloading the theme, I noticed that it is only 1.86KB.  That’s a small file… it must be doing some magic behind the scenes to download the actual pictures.  That large RSS symbol in the thumbnail is a pretty big hint as to where they come from.  I downloaded the theme to my desktop, opened it in Notepad, and the structure is rather clear (and fully documented on MSDN here: Creating and Installing Theme Files.  The theme file basically says to keep the icons and sound effects as their defaults, and to download pictures from an RSS feed. 

So…  if you want to make your own theme with pictures off the Internet, just copy the following text, paste it into Notepad, and change the 3 highlighted areas (the Display Name is what shows up in the Theme control panel as the name for the theme.  The RSS feed at the bottom must have  the pictures as enclosure.

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I’ve been playing with creating Windows 7 ThemePacks and saw the “RSSFeed” setting, but hadn’t seen anyone use it. Then just recently the Bing Dynamic Theme came out. That’s opened the gates to more RSS Feed based themes, provide Sean the drive to figure out how they work and got me off my butt to do the same.

The funny part is that there’s no UI to create a RSS Feed based theme, the Windows 7 UI will not let you enter in path to a given RSS feed. You HAVE to do it via editing an *.theme or downloading someone else's. Also the photo’s in the RSS feed have to be actual enclosures, not just image links. This is the part that made me initially stumble and where Sean showed me, via his post, that it’s no big deal. Heck with four characters you can turn any Flickr feed into one that supports enclosures! How cool is that!

Anyway, I’m working on a very cheese, not even close to ready to share, project that makes it easy to build ThemePacks (which is surprisingly kind of a pain, being the metadata is INI based and the container is a CAB… very 90’s lol ;) which last night I tweaked to add in RSS Theme based support.

I keep these “ThemePack Builder” (cleaver code name for my utility isn’t it?) ThemePacks up on SkyDrive and posted three new *_RSS_Theme.ThemePacks there. Two use the two links Sean provided (NASA and Webshots) and one that’s a Flickr stream of a trail that I walk every so often.

 

Related Past Post XRef:
[Proof of Concept] Windows 7 ThemePack Builder (with three test/sample themepacks for you)