I love RSS; I literally couldn’t do my self-appointed job without it. But when it comes to temporarily monitoring topics, RSS feeds are a bit unwieldy; you have to add another layer of workflow to add/remove feeds, set up reminders for yourself, etc.
All that has hitherto discouraged me from using RSS when there was a time-sensitive or current event topic to cover. But RSS is too valuable to leave on the shelf when curating content. So I made a Google Sheets-based tool called Temporary Obsessions Feed Reader.
Using Google Sheets means I don’t have to make an interface and don’t have to figure out an email solution, so this was pretty easy to put together with Google Apps Script. Here’s how it works:
- You populate a Google Sheet with a list of RSS feeds along with a start and stop date, any keywords you want to highlight in the emailed summaries and the feed title if you want something different from what the feed offers.
- Once a day TOFR fetches the RSS feeds, filters for items from the previous day, and assembles them into an email digest for you.
- The email also warns you of expiring RSS feeds and reminds you of feeds which will start soon:
I’m really pleased with how this turned out. I expect I’m going to use it in two scenarios:
- For monitoring immediate or upcoming news and events temporarily;
- For following up. The next time Elon Musk promises something — say, Chia Teslas in June 2026 as a renewed commitment to eco-friendliness — I’m going to create a few keyword-based RSS feeds and drop them in TOFR. Then when June 2026 rolls around, I’ll start getting news articles about the release of the Chia Tesla. Or not.
Should I put this one up on GitHub?
