One of the first things that I missed when I realized that my laptop was lost was (beside tons of photos and college documentation) a couple of old hacks, most of them on pygtk, more than a year ago I started lurking on the #art-gnome channel trying to add atom feeds to art.gnome.org, benzea did a great job adding support to art.gnome.org back then. Once the support was added, I hacked a small pygtk app to use the feed to select backgrounds from the site and apply them without browser interaction.
Fortunately, there was a copy of the hack on my gmail history, and Jilorio backgrounds has come alive again. Check out the git repository or the 0.1 tarball.
If you are looking for an easy hack, metacity and gtk themes variants of the app would be really cool. Any patch or comments are welcome.
Silicon Island 
Shouldn’t this be in the stock background capplet?
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@Mattias:
Indeed, however we need to explore more to see if the the ATOM spec extension that we did is the correct answer to the problem.
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I’m having trouble cloning this over http. git helpfully suggests that you might need to run git-update-server-info
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Not to be particular, but it’s idiomatic to have bare repositories in directories that end in .git. That didn’t help me clone it, tho. Running get repack would be a good idea, too.
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Having feeds in the regular background capplet is something we requested at the artists meeting at Guadec too. Rock on Alp!
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