Polls an RSS feed and notifies when any entry's title or summary contains a configured keyword.

RSS Keyword Watch

Polls an RSS feed and notifies the owner when at least one recent entry's title or summary contains a configured keyword.

What it does

On each fire (default hourly — edit the schedule when you install), the monitor calls the rss-reader tool with the configured feed URL, pulling entries from the last 24 hours. The when: arm uses the contains operator against the generated digest text to detect whether any entry mentions the keyword.

If yes, notify with the full digest. If no, fall through to the else: arm and do nothing.

Edit before installing

In monitor.yaml:

check.args.feedUrls — comma-separated list of RSS/Atom feed URLs.
check.args.maxEntries — how many entries to scan per fire.
check.args.hoursBack — how far back to look. If your schedule runs hourly, set this to 1 so each fire only sees new content.
when[0].condition — change kubernetes to your keyword. The match is a case-sensitive substring of the digest text (titles + summaries).
For multiple keywords, chain with ||: {{check.digest}} contains aws || {{check.digest}} contains lambda

Bindings used

{{check.digest}} — formatted multi-line digest of recent entries.
{{check.entryCount}} — total entries scanned (number).
{{check.feedCount}} — number of feeds scanned (number).
{{check.entries}} — raw entries as a JSON array (for templating individual fields).

Tool used

rss-reader — hub-installed YAML tool, no API key required. Works with any standard RSS or Atom feed.

Pattern showcase

The contains operator is the most useful condition operator for content monitoring. It's a plain string substring check — no regex, no escaping. For fuzzy matching ("posts that sound critical of our product"), use an ai: arm instead — see the hn-keyword-watch monitor for that pattern.

Watch-out

This monitor does not de-duplicate across fires. If your feed re-publishes the same matching entry every hour, you'll get an hourly notification until it falls outside hoursBack. To suppress duplicates, lower hoursBack to match your schedule interval, or pair with a separate state-tracking tool.