Blogwatcher — RSS/Atom Feed Monitoring Setup Guide¶

Monitor blogs and RSS/Atom feeds directly from your Hermes agent. The blogwatcher skill wraps the blogwatcher-cli tool, enabling automated content discovery, trend monitoring, and competitive intelligence — all without API keys or third-party services.

Source: nousresearch/hermes-agent via skills.sh

Installation¶

npx skills add nousresearch/hermes-agent --skill blogwatcher

Prerequisites¶

Hermes Agent installed and running
Node.js 18+ (for npx)
No API keys required — blogwatcher-cli reads RSS/Atom feeds directly

Configuration¶

The skill auto-discovers feeds. To add custom feeds:

# Add a feed to monitor
blogwatcher add https://example.com/feed.xml

# List monitored feeds
blogwatcher list

# Check for new posts since last poll
blogwatcher check

Common Use Cases¶

1. Competitive Intelligence¶

Monitor competitor blogs and product updates:

blogwatcher add https://competitor.com/blog/feed.xml
blogwatcher add https://another-competitor.com/rss

2. Industry News Tracking¶

Stay on top of AI/ML papers, tech news, and industry announcements:

blogwatcher add https://blog.google/technology/ai/rss/
blogwatcher add https://openai.com/blog/rss.xml
blogwatcher add https://www.anthropic.com/blog/rss.xml

Find shareable content for automated social posting:

blogwatcher check --since 24h --format json | jq '.[].title'

Integration with Hermes Cron Jobs¶

Create a cron job to check feeds daily:

hermes cron create \\
  --name "blogwatcher-daily-check" \\
  --schedule "0 8 * * *" \\
  --command "blogwatcher check --since 24h" \\
  --deliver telegram

Limitations¶

Only supports RSS 2.0 and Atom 1.0 formats
No authentication for private feeds (use curl + auth headers as fallback)
Rate-limited by source servers (respects 429 responses)
No full-text extraction (headlines + summaries only)

Troubleshooting¶

Issue	Solution
`blogwatcher: command not found`	Install via npx first: `npx skills add nousresearch/hermes-agent --skill blogwatcher`
Feed returns empty	Check feed URL in browser — site may use JavaScript rendering
Feed times out	Source server may be blocking headless requests. Add `User-Agent` header