feed-watcher_skill

Overview

This skill monitors RSS and Atom feeds and sends notifications when new content appears. It tracks YouTube channels, Reddit subreddits, GitHub releases, blogs, and any standard feed, keeping persistent state so it only reports new items. Webhook output makes it easy to integrate with Discord, Telegram, Slack, or any HTTP endpoint.

How this skill works

You register feeds by name and URL; the skill periodically fetches each feed, compares items against a stored last-seen identifier, and composes a notification when new entries are found. State files persist per-feed so subsequent runs only deliver fresh content. Notifications are sent as JSON to a configured webhook URL; the skill can be run manually or scheduled with cron.

When to use it

• Track new videos from YouTube channels via their feed
• Monitor subreddit posts using Reddit .rss endpoints
• Watch GitHub releases or tags via releases.atom
• Aggregate blog posts from multiple RSS/Atom sources
• Send real-time alerts to chat services through webhooks

Best practices

• Run an initial scan before enabling cron to verify feed parsing and webhook delivery
• Set a descriptive feed name when adding sources to make alerts clear
• Use a stable data directory (DATA_DIR) to preserve state across restarts
• Limit fetch frequency for large numbers of feeds to avoid rate limits
• Provide a custom USER_AGENT if a feed rejects default clients

Example use cases

• Notify a Discord channel when a monitored YouTube channel publishes a video
• Send new subreddit posts to a Telegram group for topic monitoring
• Track releases for a set of GitHub repositories and notify a team Slack
• Aggregate multiple blog feeds and post daily digests to a webhook
• Use as a lightweight backup alert system for any RSS/Atom-based service