Blogwatcher

Blog and Feed Watcher

Monitor RSS and Atom feeds from blogs, news sites, and podcasts to track new posts. Uses the feedparser Python library — no API keys required for most feeds.

When to Use

• User wants to check for new posts from specific blogs or news sites
• User wants to aggregate headlines from multiple sources
• User wants to monitor a research blog or tech feed for updates
• User wants to read the latest posts from a site that has an RSS feed
• User wants to set up periodic feed monitoring

How to Use

1. Install feedparser

powershellCopy code
pip install feedparser

2. Read a single RSS/Atom feed

pythonCopy code
import feedparser
from datetime import datetime

feed = feedparser.parse("https://news.ycombinator.com/rss")
print(f"Feed: {feed.feed.title}")
print(f"Posts: {len(feed.entries)}\n")

for entry in feed.entries[:5]:
  title   = entry.get("title", "No title")
  link    = entry.get("link", "")
  date    = entry.get("published", "Unknown date")
  print(f"• {title}\n  {link}\n  {date}\n")

3. Monitor multiple feeds

pythonCopy code
import feedparser, time

FEEDS = [
  "https://feeds.feedburner.com/oreilly/radar",
  "https://blog.openai.com/rss/",
  "https://news.ycombinator.com/rss",
  "https://simonwillison.net/atom/everything/",
]

def fetch_all(feeds, max_per_feed=5):
  results = []
  for url in feeds:
    feed = feedparser.parse(url)
    for entry in feed.entries[:max_per_feed]:
      results.append({
        "source":    feed.feed.get("title", url),
        "title":     entry.get("title", ""),
        "link":      entry.get("link", ""),
        "published": entry.get("published", ""),
      })
  return sorted(results, key=lambda x: x["published"], reverse=True)

for item in fetch_all(FEEDS):
  print(f"[{item['source']}] {item['title']}\n  {item['link']}")

4. Filter posts by keyword

pythonCopy code
import feedparser

def search_feed(url, keyword):
  feed    = feedparser.parse(url)
  keyword = keyword.lower()
  matches = [
    e for e in feed.entries
    if keyword in e.get("title","").lower() or keyword in e.get("summary","").lower()
  ]
  for e in matches:
    print(f"• {e.title}\n  {e.link}\n")

search_feed("https://news.ycombinator.com/rss", "llm")

5. Find the RSS feed URL for a site

Common RSS URL patterns:

Copy code
https://site.com/feed
https://site.com/rss
https://site.com/feed.xml
https://site.com/atom.xml
https://site.com/blog/feed

pythonCopy code
import feedparser, requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup   # pip install beautifulsoup4

def find_feed(site_url):
  resp = requests.get(site_url, timeout=10, headers={"User-Agent": "Mozilla/5.0"})
  soup = BeautifulSoup(resp.text, "html.parser")
  for tag in soup.find_all("link", type=lambda t: t and "rss" in t or "atom" in t):
    print(tag.get("href"))

find_feed("https://simonwillison.net")

6. Save latest posts to a file

pythonCopy code
import feedparser, json

feed  = feedparser.parse("https://news.ycombinator.com/rss")
posts = [{"title": e.title, "link": e.link, "date": e.get("published","")} for e in feed.entries[:20]]
with open("hn_feed.json", "w") as f:
  json.dump(posts, f, indent=2)
print(f"Saved {len(posts)} posts to hn_feed.json")

Examples

"What are the latest posts from Hacker News?" → Use step 2 with https://news.ycombinator.com/rss.

"Monitor these 4 AI blogs and show me posts about agents from the last week" → Use step 3 to fetch all, then step 4 logic to filter for agent keyword.

"Does this blog have an RSS feed? If so, get the latest 5 posts" → Use step 5 to discover the feed URL, then step 2 to fetch posts.

Cautions

• Some sites block RSS scrapers — use a browser-like User-Agent header if getting 403 errors
• feedparser handles both RSS 2.0, RSS 1.0, and Atom — no need to distinguish them
• entry.published format varies by feed — some use RFC 2822, others ISO 8601; don't assume a format
• Very active feeds (e.g. Reddit) may return 100+ entries — always use slicing ([:n]) to limit output