RSS & Atom Feed Parser

Parse any RSS or Atom feed into structured JSON and plug it straight into your monitoring pipeline. Tracking competitor blogs, industry news, or podcast releases becomes a scheduled job that outputs clean, normalized data — no XML wrangling required. Feed it dozens of URLs at once and get back every item with title, link, date, author, and content snippet.

Features

• Multi-feed processing — parse dozens of RSS and Atom feeds in a single run
• Format-agnostic — handles RSS 2.0, RSS 1.0, and Atom feeds automatically
• Normalized output — consistent JSON structure regardless of feed format differences
• Content snippets — extracts plain-text previews from HTML content fields
• Category extraction — preserves article categories and tags from feed metadata
• Configurable limits — control how many items to extract per feed
• Timeout protection — per-feed timeout prevents slow feeds from blocking the entire run

Input

Field	Type	Required	Default	Description
urls	array	Yes	—	List of RSS or Atom feed URLs to parse (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/rss)
maxItems	integer	No	100	Maximum number of items to extract per feed (1-500)
timeoutSeconds	integer	No	15	Per-feed fetch timeout in seconds (1-120)

Input Example

{
  "urls": [
    "https://news.ycombinator.com/rss",
    "https://feeds.arstechnica.com/arstechnica/index"
  ],
  "maxItems": 50,
  "timeoutSeconds": 15
}

Output

Each dataset item represents one feed item (article, post, or episode). Key fields:

• feedUrl (string) — the source feed URL
• feedTitle (string) — title of the parent feed
• itemTitle (string) — title of the individual item
• itemLink (string) — URL to the full content
• pubDate (string) — publication date
• creator (string) — author or creator name
• contentSnippet (string) — plain-text preview of the content
• guid (string) — unique identifier for the item
• categories (array) — list of tags or categories

Output Example

{
  "feedUrl": "https://news.ycombinator.com/rss",
  "feedTitle": "Hacker News",
  "itemTitle": "Show HN: Open-source tool for managing database migrations",
  "itemLink": "https://github.com/example/db-migrate",
  "pubDate": "Mon, 20 Jan 2025 18:45:00 +0000",
  "creator": null,
  "contentSnippet": "A lightweight CLI for managing SQL migrations across Postgres, MySQL, and SQLite.",
  "guid": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38901234",
  "categories": []
}

Pricing

Event	Cost
Item Parsed	Pay-per-event (see actor pricing page)

Use Cases

• Content monitoring — schedule daily runs to track blog posts, news articles, or podcast episodes
• Competitive intelligence — follow competitor RSS feeds for product announcements and blog updates
• Data pipeline ingestion — normalize feed data into JSON for downstream processing, databases, or dashboards
• Newsletter automation — aggregate content from multiple sources into a curated feed
• AI agent context — supply structured article data to LLM pipelines and RAG applications
• Slack/webhook alerts — combine with Apify integrations to push new items to Slack or email

Related Actors

Actor	What it adds
Google News Scraper	Search Google News by keyword instead of parsing known feed URLs
Hacker News Scraper	Get richer Hacker News data (scores, comments) via the Firebase API
Markdown Extractor	Convert the linked articles into clean Markdown for LLM ingestion