Rss Feeds

Read RSS, Atom, JSON feeds; discover feeds behind a page.

Skill metadata

Source	Bundled (installed by default)
Path	skills/research/rss-feeds
Version	1.0.0
Author	Teknium (teknium1), Hermes Agent
License	MIT
Platforms	linux, macos, windows
Tags	RSS, Atom, Feeds, Monitoring, Research, Blogs, Releases
Related skills	reddit-reading, competitor-news-monitor, grounded-citations, youtube-content, blogwatcher

Reference: full SKILL.md

info

The following is the complete skill definition that Hermes loads when this skill is triggered. This is what the agent sees as instructions when the skill is active.

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

Source	Feed URL pattern
GitHub releases / commits / tags	https://github.com/OWNER/REPO/releases.atom, …/commits/BRANCH.atom, …/tags.atom
Subreddit / Reddit search	https://www.reddit.com/r/NAME/.rss, https://www.reddit.com/search.rss?q=… (1 req/min anon; see reddit-reading)
YouTube channel	https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UC…
Hacker News	https://hnrss.org/frontpage, https://hnrss.org/newest?q=TERM
arXiv category	https://rss.arxiv.org/rss/cs.CL
Substack / Medium / WordPress / Ghost	SITE/feed, medium.com/feed/@user, SITE/rss/
Podcasts	the show's RSS URL from its hosting page (discover finds it)

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.