RSS Aggregator
Monitor RSS/Atom feeds on a schedule, filter by keywords or date, and route summaries to your preferred channel.
Setup
Requires the feedparser Python package:
pip install feedparser
Core Script
Save as scripts/fetch_feeds.py:
#!/usr/bin/env python3
"""RSS/Atom feed fetcher with filtering and summarization."""
import feedparser
import sys
import json
from datetime import datetime, timedelta
from pathlib import Path
def parse_date(entry):
"""Extract publication date from entry."""
for field in ('published_parsed', 'updated_parsed', 'created_parsed'):
if hasattr(entry, field) and entry.get(field):
return datetime(*entry[field][:6])
return None
def fetch_feed(url, max_age_days=None, keyword_filter=None):
"""Fetch and filter feed entries."""
feed = feedparser.parse(url)
entries = feed.entries
# Filter by age
if max_age_days:
cutoff = datetime.now() - timedelta(days=max_age_days)
entries = [e for e in entries if parse_date(e) and parse_date(e) >= cutoff]
# Filter by keyword
if keyword_filter:
kw_lower = keyword_filter.lower()
entries = [e for e in entries if kw_lower in (e.get('title', '') + e.get('summary', '')).lower()]
return {
'title': feed.feed.get('title', url),
'url': url,
'entries': [
{
'title': e.get('title', 'No title'),
'link': e.get('link', ''),
'published': parse_date(e).isoformat() if parse_date(e) else None,
'summary': e.get('summary', e.get('description', ''))[:500]
}
for e in entries
]
}
if __name__ == '__main__':
url = sys.argv[1] if len(sys.argv) > 1 else ''
max_age = int(sys.argv[2]) if len(sys.argv) > 2 else None
keyword = sys.argv[3] if len(sys.argv) > 3 else None
if not url:
print(json.dumps({'error': 'URL required'}))
sys.exit(1)
result = fetch_feed(url, max_age, keyword)
print(json.dumps(result, indent=2))
Recipes
Recipe 1: Daily News Digest
cron_add(
name="Tech news digest",
schedule={"kind": "cron", "expr": "0 8 * * 1-5", "tz": "Africa/Johannesburg"},
payload={
"kind": "agentTurn",
"message": "Run: python scripts/fetch_feeds.py https://news.ycombinator.com/rss 7. Then summarize the top 5 stories as a clean bullet list with titles and links."
},
delivery={"mode": "announce"},
sessionTarget="isolated"
)
Recipe 2: Multi-Feed Monitoring
// First, create scripts/multi_fetch.py:
"""
import feedparser, json, sys
from scripts.fetch_feeds import fetch_feed
feeds = [
"https://techcrunch.com/feed/",
"https://www.theverge.com/rss/index.xml",
"https://feeds.feedburner.com/TechCrunch/"
]
results = [fetch_feed(url, max_age_days=1) for url in feeds]
print(json.dumps(results, indent=2))
"""
Then schedule:
cron_add(
name="Industry pulse",
schedule={"kind": "cron", "expr": "0 */6 * * *", "tz": "UTC"},
payload={
"kind": "agentTurn",
"message": "Run: python scripts/multi_fetch.py. Filter entries from last 6 hours. Post new articles to #news channel on Discord with title + link."
},
delivery={"mode": "announce"},
sessionTarget="isolated"
)
Recipe 3: Keyword Alert
cron_add(
name="AI keyword alert",
schedule={"kind": "cron", "expr": "0 */4 * * *", "tz": "UTC"},
payload={
"kind": "agentTurn",
"message": "Run: python scripts/fetch_feeds.py https://feeds.feedburner.com/venturebeat/Settings 1 \"AI OR machine learning OR LLM\". If results have entries, format as: **Alert** [Article Title](URL). Send to Discord #alerts channel."
},
delivery={"mode": "webhook", "to": "https://discord.com/api/webhooks/..."},
sessionTarget="isolated"
)
Recipe 4: Feed Status Health Check
cron_add(
name="Feed health check",
schedule={"kind": "cron", "expr": "0 9 * * *", "tz": "UTC"},
payload={
"kind": "agentTurn",
"message": "Check if these feeds are still live: Hacker News (https://news.ycombinator.com/rss), TechCrunch (https://techcrunch.com/feed/). Run fetch without filters. If any feed returns 0 entries or error, alert via webhook."
},
delivery={"mode": "announce"},
sessionTarget="isolated",
failureAlert={"after": 3, "mode": "announce", "cooldownMs": 86400000}
)
Recipe 5: Feed to Read Later (Notion)
cron_add(
name="RSS to Notion",
schedule={"kind": "cron", "expr": "0 7 * * *", "tz": "Africa/Johannesburg"},
payload={
"kind": "agentTurn",
"message": "Run: python scripts/fetch_feeds.py https://example.com/rss 1. Create Notion page for each entry in your Reading List database with title, link, and summary as page content."
},
delivery={"mode": "none"},
sessionTarget="isolated"
)
Managing Feeds
# Test a feed directly
python scripts/fetch_feeds.py <feed-url> [max-age-days] [keyword-filter]
# Example
python scripts/fetch_feeds.py https://news.ycombinator.com/rss 7
python scripts/fetch_feeds.py https://techcrunch.com/feed/ 1 "AI"
Feed Discovery
Find RSS feeds on any website by:
- Adding
/feed or /rss to the URL
- Checking the page source for
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml">
- Using
site:rss search on Google
Common feed URLs:
- YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=CHANNEL_ID
- Twitter/X: No native RSS — use替他 (Nitter for Twitter lists)
- Reddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/SUBREDDIT.rss (requires auth for full content)
Troubleshooting
| Symptom | Cause | Fix |
|---|
| Empty entries list | Feed may require auth or be XML-only | Try curl to inspect raw feed |
decode error in feed | Malformed encoding | Add , encoding='utf-8' to feedparser.parse() |
| Unicode errors | Non-UTF8 characters | Add , response_encoding='utf-8' to parse call |
| Old entries only | max_age_days too restrictive | Increase or remove the filter |
| Missing summaries | Site blocks feed scrapers | Use e.get('content', [{}])[0].get('value', '') for full content |
See Also
fuzzy-cron-scheduler skill — scheduling recurring feed checksnotion-integration skill — storing articles in Notiondiscord skill — routing articles to Discord channelswebhook-automation skill — HTTP delivery to any endpoint
