Bad AppleScript: Fake RSS, Real Newsletter
Jason Snell (tweet):
Here was my bad idea: Just because MailChimp’s RSS system didn’t work the way I wanted it to didn’t mean I couldn’t make it work the way I wanted it to. I could set MailChimp to automatically mail out an email on Friday evenings to all Six Colors subscribers, based on an RSS feed.
And then I could write a script that would generate an RSS feed with a single entry, containing exactly the newsletter I wanted to send.
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Though there are some ways to parse RSS feed using the System Events app’s built-in XML parsing, it’s unreliable. Instead, I turned to the JSON format, which is much easier to work with, thanks to Mousedown Software’s excellent app JSON Helper, which converts JSON feeds into AppleScript objects.
