Make RSS screensaver show more articles?

I have an RSS screensaver, but at the moment it only displays a few articles and then loops. Is there a way to make it display more articles?

Sure — the easiest way to do this is to edit the screensaver's Quartz composition file. It's located at

/System/Library/Screen Savers/RSS Visualizer.qtz

In order to edit this, you'll need Quartz Composer, which you may already have (if you installed an old version of the developer tools), or you can download it with the Graphics Tools package here.

Open the aforementioned file, click on the "RSS" macro patch, and change the News Count to your liking:

Then save the file or make a copy and put it in ~/Library/Screen Savers.

Edit: I just spent a while trying to figure out if you can expose this option via the options panel, but it seems there's some very specific interface in place for the RSS Visualizer screensaver (see /System/Library/Frameworks/ScreenSaver.framework/Versions/A/Resources/.Quartz Composer.saver/Contents/Resources), so you can't do it if you also want to see the normal RSS options.

This might depend on the RSS feed. If the RSS feed only contains 5 entries, there’s no easy way for you to display more entries in the screensaver.

If that’s the case (your question didn’t specify which feed you’re talking about, so there’s no way for me to check), you could create your own RSS feed based on the website’s HTML, rather than use the one the website is offering. That way, you could have more entries in the feed. This can be done using FeedWeaver, a free online web app.