gabrielmoreira RSS Feeds Skill
Reads any RSS 2.0, RSS 1.0/RDF, Atom, or JSON Feed URL into a clean, date-sorted list of
entries, and discovers the feed behind an ordinary page URL (<link rel="alternate"> or
the usual /feed, /rss.xml, /atom.xml paths). Standard library only, nothing to
install. It does not fetch full article bodies — pass an entry's link to web_extract for
that.
When to Use
- "What's new on <blog/site>", "latest releases of ", "recent posts in ", "read this feed", "does this site have an RSS feed".
- Building a recurring digest with
cronjob_manage(feeds are cheaper and more stable than scraping the HTML front page every run). For a persistent read/unread database across many feeds install the optionalblogwatcherskill; this skill is the zero-install read. - Anything where a structured list of
title / link / date / author / summarybeats a rendered page: podcasts, changelogs, YouTube channels, newsrooms, forum categories.
Prerequisites
None. Python 3.10+, network access to the feed host.
How to Run
Run through terminal with the skill-relative script path:
python3 scripts/feed.py read https://hnrss.org/frontpage --limit 10
python3 scripts/feed.py read https://simonwillison.net/ # page URL → discovers the feed
python3 scripts/feed.py read URL --since 2026-09-01 --json # only newer entries, machine-readable
python3 scripts/feed.py discover https://example.com/ # list candidate feed URLs
Quick Reference
| Source | Feed URL pattern |
|---|---|
| GitHub releases / commits / tags | https://github.com/OWNER/REPO/releases.atom, …/commits/BRANCH.atom, …/tags.atom |
| Subreddit / Reddit search | https://www.reddit.com/r/NAME/.rss, https://www.reddit.com/search.rss?q=… (1 req/min anon; see reddit-reading) |
| YouTube channel | https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UC… |
| Hacker News | https://hnrss.org/frontpage, https://hnrss.org/newest?q=TERM |
| arXiv category | https://rss.arxiv.org/rss/cs.CL |
| Substack / Medium / WordPress / Ghost | SITE/feed, medium.com/feed/@user, SITE/rss/ |
| Podcasts | the show's RSS URL from its hosting page (discover finds it) |
Output fields per entry: title, link, published (UTC ISO 8601), author, summary
(HTML stripped, ≤ 2000 chars). Entries are sorted newest-first.
Procedure
① If you only have a site URL, run read on it directly; the script discovers the feed
and reports which URL it used (discovered_from). Use discover when you want to choose
between several advertised feeds (comments feed vs posts feed, per-category feeds).
② Bound the request: --limit for "latest N", --since YYYY-MM-DD for "since last
check". For a cron digest persist the last-seen published value and pass it as
--since next run.
③ For full text, hand the entry link to web_extract; feed summaries are frequently
truncated or the first paragraph only.
④ Cite the entry link, not the feed URL, when the result feeds a report
(grounded-citations).
Pitfalls
- A 200 response with HTML means the URL is a page, not a feed; the script falls through
to discovery automatically, but a site with no
<link rel="alternate">and none of the common paths reportsno feed found— check the site's footer or/sitemap.xmlbefore concluding there is none. - Reddit feeds share Reddit's anonymous throttle (about one request per minute per IP).
Chain them through
reddit-reading, which waits out the window, when you need more than one Reddit call. - Dates: RSS
pubDateis RFC 822 and Atom uses ISO 8601; the script normalises both to UTC. Feeds that omit dates sort to the bottom and are dropped by--since. - Some feeds are Cloudflare-fronted and 403 non-browser clients;
blocked-page-recoveryhandles that class.
Verification
python3 scripts/feed.py read https://github.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent/releases.atom --limit 1 prints one entry with a releases/tag/ link and a [atom] format tag;
discover https://simonwillison.net/ prints an /atom/ URL.