newsboat

What This Skill Does

The newsboat skill enables the OpenClaw AI agent to interface directly with the Newsboat terminal-based RSS/Atom feed reader. By leveraging the local sqlite3 cache of Newsboat, this skill allows the agent to track, monitor, and retrieve the latest updates from your favorite websites, blogs, and news sources without requiring a GUI. It essentially bridges the gap between static feed files and intelligent data processing, allowing the agent to parse HTML content into readable plain text for summarization, research, or content aggregation tasks.

Installation

To install this skill, use the ClawHub CLI: clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/ianwu-ca-778/openclaw-skills-newsboat. Ensure you have Newsboat installed on your system. For Debian/Ubuntu, use sudo apt install newsboat sqlite3 pandoc. For macOS, use brew install newsboat sqlite3 pandoc. Verify the installation by checking if ~/.newsboat/cache.db exists after running a standard sync of your feeds.

Use Cases

This skill is ideal for users who consume high volumes of digital content and want to automate their digest. Typical use cases include: 1) Automated daily summaries of specific niche industry news. 2) Real-time monitoring of developer blogs or project repositories. 3) Aggregating content from multiple sources into a custom knowledge base. 4) Filtering feed articles based on keywords and saving them to local files for offline reading.

Example Prompts

• "Can you check my RSS feeds for the latest technology news and provide a 3-bullet point summary of the most recent article?"
• "Read the latest entry from my news feeds and tell me what the main topic is, then save the content as a markdown file in my drafts folder."
• "What are the most recent updates from my configured RSS feeds from the last 24 hours?"

Tips & Limitations

The primary limitation of this skill is that it depends on the local Newsboat configuration; if your feeds are not correctly synchronized, the agent cannot access new data. Furthermore, the skill relies on pandoc for HTML conversion; for highly complex layouts or scripts, some elements might be stripped. Ensure your ~/.newsboat/urls file is properly formatted. Always check your cache permissions to ensure the agent has read access to ~/.newsboat/cache.db to prevent silent failures.