In a previous post, I talked about using NodePing to send downtime notifications to Slack and having those alerts go to your phone. In this post, I’m going to cover a similar concept: using Slack to track one or more RSS feeds and get alerts when a new item is posted to a feed.
To start with, you’ll want to manage your Slack instance and go to the “Apps” section. If the RSS app doesn’t exist, it should be easy enough to add. Once added, it will look like this:
Click on the RSS app, and you’ll see a list of feeds, which will probably be empty:
If you scroll down, you’ll be able to add a feed, and have alerts go to whichever channel you want. For this example, I’m using the lorem-rss feed, which generates a new item every minute:
Once added, you will see the RSS feed show up in your list:
Here comes the important part of the post: the RSS app in Slack is NOT real-time. That means that you won’t see a new message appear once every minute. Instead you will see them appear in irregular batches. So after adding the Lorem Ipsum RSS feed, go grab a coffee and check back in half an hour. You’ll likely see several batches of notifications:
Now that you know how to add RSS feeds, you can remove that one, and here are a few other RSS feeds worth adding:
Aaaaaand… that’s about all I got. Do you have any interesting RSS feeds to monitor? Let me know in the comments!