Rss Watcher

RSS Watcher Skill

Track RSS and Atom feed updates using command-line tools.

When to Use

✅ USE this skill when:

• Track blogs, news sites, YouTube channels
• Monitor podcast feeds
• Follow GitHub release feeds
• Watch any RSS/Atom endpoint

Installation

No additional installation required - uses standard Unix tools:

• curl - HTTP requests
• xmllint - XML parsing (from libxml2)

Commands

Fetch Feed

# Basic feed fetch
curl -s "https://example.com/feed.xml"

# Fetch with headers (useful for debugging)
curl -sI "https://example.com/feed.xml"

# Save feed to file
curl -s "https://example.com/feed.xml" -o feed.xml

Parse Feed Items

# Extract titles (RSS 2.0)
xmllint --xpath "//item/title/text()" feed.xml 2>/dev/null

# Extract titles (Atom)
xmllint --xpath "//entry/title/text()" feed.xml 2>/dev/null

# Extract links (RSS 2.0)
xmllint --xpath "//item/link/text()" feed.xml 2>/dev/null

# Extract links (Atom)
xmllint --xpath "//entry/link/@href" feed.xml 2>/dev/null

# Extract publication dates
xmllint --xpath "//item/pubDate/text()" feed.xml 2>/dev/null

# Extract first 5 titles
xmllint --xpath "//item[position() <= 5]/title/text()" feed.xml 2>/dev/null

Common Feeds

# GitHub releases
curl -s "https://github.com/stephengpope/thepopebot/releases.atom"

# Hacker News
curl -s "https://news.ycombinator.com/rss"

# YouTube channel (as RSS)
curl -s "https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCxxxx"

# Reddit (via RSS)
curl -s "https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/.rss"

Check for New Items

# Get latest item title
curl -s "https://example.com/feed.xml" | xmllint --xpath "//item[1]/title/text()" - 2>/dev/null

# Compare saved state
curl -s "https://example.com/feed.xml" -o /tmp/feed_new.xml
diff /tmp/feed_old.xml /tmp/feed_new.xml
mv /tmp/feed_new.xml /tmp/feed_old.xml

Full Example: Monitor Feed

#!/bin/bash
FEED_URL="https://example.com/feed.xml"
STATE_FILE="/tmp/rss_state.txt"

# Fetch latest titles
TITLES=$(curl -s "$FEED_URL" | xmllint --xpath "//item/title/text()" - 2>/dev/null)

# Check against last seen
LAST_SEEN=$(cat "$STATE_FILE" 2>/dev/null)

if [ "$TITLES" != "$LAST_SEEN" ]; then
  echo "New items found:"
  echo "$TITLES"
  echo "$TITLES" > "$STATE_FILE"
else
  echo "No new items"
fi

Notes

• Rate limit requests - add delays between fetches
• Some sites may block curl; try adding User-Agent header
• Not all feeds are well-formed; handle parse errors gracefully
• Use xmllint --html for HTML-parsed feeds