A few months ago I wrote a little todo app in Python. This app is a very thin interface over, well, lines of text in a file. I can

$ todo.py --add="buy food"

and the text "buy food" is appeneded to the file. My script also lists the lines in the file (yah, like cat, except my script keeps track of the item numbers as well as the item.)

Now, my big thing is remembering to run this app every day. Somedays I'll totally forget about the script, and make no progress on my todo items. My .login file asks for a count of pending items, but that doesn't seem to be enough reinforcement for me.

Then I noticed something - NetNewsWire 2.0 lets you subscribe to scripts - Applescripts, or shell scripts. These scripts must output RSS/Atom, but that's not a hard limit (even implimenting a RSS 2.0 writer from scratch isn't that hard.)

So I decided to couple that with my todo.py script. About 30 minutes later, with thanks to PyRSS2Gen I had my todo list items in my newsreader.

Yay!