Hourly RSS check with notification

RSS readers exist, but they want you to open them. You just want to know if there's something new on the feed you actually care about — your team's blog, a hiring board, a release announcement channel — without subscribing to a paid notification service. This template pulls a JSON-feed endpoint every hour and pops a desktop notification with the latest item identifier. Default endpoint is Hacker News' best-stories feed; adapt it to whatever JSON feed you actually follow. Good for ops engineers tracking release feeds, recruiters watching a job board, or news junkies who'd rather pull than poll.

How this workflow works

Three blocks. The pattern is identical to other notification templates — schedule, fetch, notify — but using interval timing instead of cron.

1. schedule_trigger — Interval mode, intervalMs: 3600000 (every 3,600,000 ms = 1 hour). Unlike cron which fires at specific times, interval fires N milliseconds after the previous run (or after install for the first one). Works fine for "every hour" but for "every day at exactly 9 AM" use cron mode.
2. http_request — A GET against https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/beststories.json?limitToFirst=1. This is HN's Firebase-backed real-time API; limitToFirst=1 clamps the response to a single-element array. responseType: "json" parses to a number-array like [39871234]. The result is exposed as $('GET feed').body.
3. notification — Chrome native notification with title "Feed check" and message "Top item: {{$('GET feed').body}}". Because the body is the raw array, the notification shows something like Top item: 39871234. To get the story title you'd need a second http_request against /v0/item/<id>.json.

The trigger fires every hour as long as Chrome is running. If you close Chrome, the interval pauses; it resumes the next time the extension wakes.

Customising it for your case

This template is intentionally minimal — the real value is in adapting the endpoint and the notification copy.

• Use a different feed. Replace the URL with any JSON endpoint that returns items. For Reddit, https://www.reddit.com/r/<sub>.json?limit=1 returns a structured response with data.children[0].data.title. For GitHub releases: https://api.github.com/repos/<owner>/<repo>/releases/latest. For Mastodon: https://<instance>/api/v1/timelines/public. Update the notification message path to match the new shape.
• Show the title, not the ID. Chain a second http_request after the first: GET https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/{{$('GET feed').body[0]}}.json, response includes a title field. Use that in the notification.
• Only notify on new items. Add a set_variable block to persist the last-seen ID, and a if_then block to compare the fetched ID against the persisted one. Only fire the notification block if they differ. This turns the workflow from "hourly heartbeat" into "real new-item alert".

Common gotchas

Three to watch. First: interval triggers drift over time because each run waits N ms after the previous completion, not after a fixed clock. After 24 runs you might be 3-5 minutes off from a clean hourly boundary. Use cron if you need calendar precision. Second: the default notification shows just the article ID, which is useless without context. Most people want to make the "show the title" tweak above before relying on this template. Third: Hacker News' Firebase API is fast and free but throttles aggressively if you hammer it from one IP. Stick to hourly or less frequent.

FAQ

Do I need an API key? No. HN's Firebase API and most RSS-to-JSON converters are public. For Reddit you don't need auth either, but Reddit's terms restrict scraping — use their official API if you go production.

Can the workflow run when my laptop is closed? No. Chrome's service worker is suspended when the browser is closed, and the interval timer pauses with it. When you reopen Chrome, the timer restarts from zero.

How is this different from a real RSS reader? RSS readers store history, give you a reading queue, and sync across devices. This template just pings a feed and shouts. It's a complement, not a replacement. Automa and Browserflow have equivalent "fetch + notify" templates; the schedule trigger semantics are the same.