UCLA Daily: Arts Fetch

UCLAArtsFetch exists for a very specific, very familiar reason: the source it should hit - arts.ucla.edu - renders entirely in JavaScript, so a lightweight node can't read it. Rather than ship a headless-browser dependency for one feed, the author routes around it. The tooltip says it outright: "arts.ucla.edu is JS-rendered, so we use the Newsroom feed." That's the whole story, and it's the right call.

This is one of the UCLA Daily pack's Newsroom-based fetchers, alongside Med and Film. The pack, by Jeffrey A. Brick, aggregates UCLA's public news and events into 1920x1080 lobby-display cards. All fetchers share the same contract: UCLA_DATA in, UCLA_DATA plus a segment_text string out, chainable in any order between UCLADailyDataInit and the rendering or report nodes.

How it works

It pulls the Arts & Culture category feed from UCLA Newsroom (https://newsroom.ucla.edu/cats/arts_+_culture.xml), parses the RSS, and normalizes items into the pipeline's event dicts. Same shared machinery as the rest of the pack: requests with a urllib fallback, mojibake cleanup, and IS_CHANGED set so every queue run re-fetches. If the feed fails, the error lands in errors[] and the rest of the graph survives.

The practical difference between this and UCLANewsroomFetch is focus. Newsroom Fetch gives you a dropdown of all 11 categories; this node is pre-locked to arts & culture with sensible defaults so you can drop it in and forget it. If you're building a display that leans into campus arts programming - gallery openings, theater, music - this is the one you reach for.

The inputs

• ucla_data - required pipeline dict from UCLADailyDataInit.
• rss_url - the Arts & Culture feed by default. Same "only change if the feed moves" caveat as its siblings.
• max_items - 1–20, default 5. How many arts items to keep.

Outputs

Two: ucla_data (enriched, chainable) and segment_text - the plain-text item list, ready to feed UCLALobbyCard or the UCLANarrator for a rewritten on-screen summary.

Install

ComfyUI Manager → search UCLA Daily, or:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/jbrick2070/ComfyUI-UCLADaily.git
pip install qrcode pillow requests

Restart ComfyUI. Nothing else to download - no keys, no models.

Common issues

Same class of gotcha as the other Newsroom fetchers: it reflects whatever the Newsroom publishes, not the full arts scene. And because IS_CHANGED means every queue run hits the network, don't leave several fetchers in the graph while you're only tuning a card's layout - you'll be fetching five feeds to throw away. Pull once, iterate on the visuals.