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 <GitHub repo>", "recent posts in <subreddit>", "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 optional blogwatcher skill; this skill is the zero-install read.
• Anything where a structured list of title / link / date / author / summary beats 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

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 reports no feed found — check the site's footer or /sitemap.xml before 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 pubDate is 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-recovery handles 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.