Blog Watcher

Name: blog-watcher
Rating: 62
Author: phuetz

Overview

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

Reading RSS/Atom Feeds

Fetch and parse with curl + jq/xmlstarlet

bash

# 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)

bash

# 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

bash

#!/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

bash

# 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)

bash

# 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