Blog Watcher

Overview

Monitor blogs and RSS/Atom feeds for new content and updates.

Reading RSS/Atom Feeds

Fetch and parse with curl + jq/xmlstarlet

# Atom feed (GitHub releases, blogs)
curl -s "https://github.com/user/repo/releases.atom" \
  | xmlstarlet sel -t -m "//entry" -v "title" -n

# RSS feed
curl -s "https://blog.example.com/rss" \
  | xmlstarlet sel -N rss="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/" -t -m "//item" -v "title" -o " | " -v "link" -n

Using newsboat (TUI reader)

# Install
sudo apt-get install newsboat  # or: brew install newsboat

# Add feeds to ~/.newsboat/urls
echo "https://blog.example.com/rss" >> ~/.newsboat/urls

# Launch
newsboat

Simple bash monitor

#!/bin/bash
# Check for new posts since last check
FEED_URL="https://blog.example.com/rss"
CACHE="/tmp/feedcache-$(echo "$FEED_URL" | md5sum | cut -d' ' -f1)"
NEW=$(curl -s "$FEED_URL" | xmlstarlet sel -t -m "//item" -v "title" -o "|" -v "link" -n | head -5)

if [ -f "$CACHE" ]; then
  diff <(cat "$CACHE") <(echo "$NEW") | grep "^>" | sed 's/^> //'
fi
echo "$NEW" > "$CACHE"

Monitoring GitHub

# Watch releases
gh api repos/owner/repo/releases --jq '.[0:5][] | "\(.tag_name) - \(.name) (\(.published_at | split("T")[0]))"'

# Watch commits
gh api repos/owner/repo/commits --jq '.[0:5][] | "\(.sha[0:7]) \(.commit.message | split("\n")[0])"'

# Watch issues
gh api repos/owner/repo/issues --jq '.[0:10][] | "#\(.number) \(.title) [\(.state)]"'

Monitoring Web Pages (changes)

# Save a snapshot and compare later
curl -s "https://example.com/page" | html2text > /tmp/page-snapshot.txt
# Later...
curl -s "https://example.com/page" | html2text | diff /tmp/page-snapshot.txt -

Tips

• Install xmlstarlet for XML/RSS parsing: apt install xmlstarlet or brew install xmlstarlet
• Use html2text to convert web pages to plain text for diffing
• Combine with cron or Code Buddy's daemon for automated monitoring
• For JSON feeds (modern blogs): just use curl -s | jq