RSS Feed Board Screensaver

A split-flap display shows characters on a set of flaps that flip one after another until the wanted character appears. Boards of this kind, often called Solari boards after the Italian maker Solari di Udine, were common from the 1960s to the 1990s, mostly showing departures and arrivals at railway stations and airports, and they were noted for their metallic clatter. Here the mechanical effect is imitated on a canvas, with each tile cycling through letters before landing on the right one.

The text itself comes from RSS or Atom, two standard formats for syndicating content. A feed is an XML file listing recent items, each typically with a title, a link, a date and often a summary. Any site or blog can publish one, and feed readers can poll it to learn about new posts without visiting the page.

A board of fixed width has to deal with long headlines by shortening or breaking them, so what you see may be an abbreviated form of the original title. Feeds are controlled by their publishers, who decide how many items to include and how often to change them, and a headline can be edited or retracted after it was fetched. The board is a rolling window on a single source, and not a ranking of importance.