rsstail: One of two possible reactions

This is one of those times when I’ll show you something, and it will either mean next to nothing … or it will reach out, grab you by the throat and pull you face-first into the screen yelling, “That’s what I’ve been looking for!” 😯

Here’s rsstail:

Not much to look at, but this is definitely one of those tools you have to get close to, if you want to see the potential.

Yes, as you can see there, rsstail basically watches a feed, then spits out the title of the newest entry. No more than that.

But it also has options to show links, comments, authors and more. You can customize text, yank out “Title” or “Link,” and in short, wrangle with the results to a high degree.

Again, that might not enthuse you, but the clever among you will have already started work on a way to jam this into conky, or hotwire it into an IRC client.

And the truly dedicated will attempt to run this through an SMS portal, and send themselves text messages for truly critical events.

rsstail is simple, flexible, intuitive and best of all, begs to be put to use in a dozen ways. It’s one of those rare tools that makes me wish I cared more for news feeds. And if you’re into multitail, the home page says it can work as a plugin. 😐

rsstail is in Debian and Arch, although the AUR version will require a few oddball dependencies to get it going. Enjoy. 😉