Feed Monitor
This Ruby gem allows you to monitor RSS feeds and have an email alert sent out every time a feed is updated. Useful for monitoring system status updates, weather alerts, and more. I use it to monitor the status feed of services I use like Amazon AWS, Twitter API, etc., and to receive weather alerts from Environment Canada directly to my email.
It's easy to use, create a script like the following:
require 'feed_monitor'
FeedMonitor.watch_feed('http://url_to_your_rss_feed/feed.xml', 'from_email@yourserver.com', 'to_email@emailaddress.com')
And then run this in the cron every 5 minutes or so. The script creates a file called feedmonitor.db in the directory the script is executed. This stores date of the last update so Feed Monitor knows when a new update has been posted.
Authors and Contributors
FeedMonitor was made by Brian Jones (@joshaidan) and is licenced under GPLv2.