Blog

Notes on news feeds, full-text Markdown and deduplication.

• 2026-11-03What the Zapier RSS trigger can't do with news feedsWe ran the Zapier RSS trigger on a real Zap: polling gaps, fields, task use and Google News links. Where it stops for news feeds, and what to use instead.
• 2026-11-02How to stop sending subscribers the same story twiceHow to deduplicate an RSS feed across newsletter issues: in our replay a 24h to 168h window dropped 2 to 3 of 271 items; 9 repeats sat inside one issue.
• 2026-11-02Newscatcher vs NewsData.io, and when to skip bothWe ran Newscatcher's free News API, NewsData.io, Google News RSS and Feedmarkdown on two queries and compared cost, freshness, full text and duplicates.
• 2026-11-02How to send Google Alerts to SlackHow to send Google Alerts to Slack: the RSS app, email forwarding, a small webhook script and no-code tools. We ran the script and the RSS app against a real Slack workspace.
• 2026-11-01Regulatory news monitoring with RSS and a webhookWe timed how soon outlets covered SEC releases in Google News, found the FTC topic had moved to city rules, and show how to send new items to a webhook.
• 2026-11-01What it costs to summarize 1,000 news articles with an LLMWhat it costs to summarize 1,000 news articles with an LLM on five models, from real token counts, 20 real summaries and list prices checked 2026-11-01.
• 2026-10-31RSS to webhook options and their trade-offsThree ways to send RSS items to a webhook: write a poller, use an automation tool, or pay a hosted service. Intervals, costs and signature code.
• 2026-10-26PolitePol (now PolitePaul) and FiveFilters alternativesPolitePol is now PolitePaul, and FiveFilters' free full-text endpoint answered us with 'discontinued'. What each does today, and what to use for news.
• 2026-10-26Which Google News RSS search operators workWe sent 49 queries to the Google News RSS search endpoint on 2026-10-22 and counted what when:, site:, -term, before: and other operators did.
• 2026-10-26How often a Google News RSS feed repeats the same storyWe counted duplicates in 7 Google News RSS feeds: 53 of 469 items repeated an earlier headline, and a breaking story repeated more than matching shows.
• 2026-10-23Running news digests for several clientsRun a news digest for clients from one account: one feed per client, shared sources, plan limits, and the dedup setting that drops stories between clients.
• 2026-10-22What a newsletter's news stack costs per monthWe priced the news-gathering layer of a daily digest on 2026-10-22: $25.73 DIY, $35.72 with a paid RSS tool, $19.00 as one feed. Live prices, with sources.
• 2026-10-22n8n RSS feed to Slack with full article textAn n8n RSS feed from Google News gives redirect links and snippets. We posted full-text stories to a mocked Slack from n8n on 2026-10-22.
• 2026-10-22Monitoring competitors with Google News RSSCompetitor monitoring with Google News RSS: we ran queries for three companies on 2026-10-22, labelled what came back and counted what each operator removed.
• 2026-10-22Google Alerts alternatives for news monitoringWe ran one query through Google Alerts, Talkwalker Alerts and Google News RSS on 2026-10-22, then sorted every other Google Alerts alternative by job.
• 2026-10-20How to pick sources for a niche news digestA measured way to choose sources for newsletter curation: list outlets with site: searches, count items per day for each, and keep the few that earn a place.
• 2026-10-17Google News topic IDs that still workGoogle News RSS topic IDs we fetched on 2026-10-17, with status codes and item counts, plus which IDs from topic pages return empty feeds.
• 2026-10-16How to set up Google Alerts so they're usefulCreate Google Alerts, pick the right settings and write queries that cut noise. We tested quoted phrases, OR, minus, site: and more on 2026-10-16.
• 2026-10-16Three ways to send an RSS feed to emailThree ways to turn an RSS feed into email: a hosted service, your email platform's RSS campaign, and a small n8n workflow. Compared from each tool's docs.
• 2026-10-15What we hit when we tried to scrape Google NewsWe ran a Google News scraper loop against the RSS feeds, the web pages and the redirect call, and recorded the status codes, blocks and failures we saw.
• 2026-10-14Media monitoring on a small budgetMost small teams can do media monitoring for online news with free feeds. We built one on 2026-10-14, counted the noise and listed what it misses.
• 2026-10-13How to feed news to an LLM without paying for HTMLA news API for LLM pipelines in four steps: fetch, clean to Markdown, dedupe, deliver. With token counts for raw HTML vs Markdown on three real articles.
• 2026-10-12Deduplicating news: why matching headlines isn't enoughNews deduplication on real data: where headline matching and content fingerprinting each break, and why dedup has to run before and after the scrape.
• 2026-10-11Google News links redirect. How to get the real article URLWhy a Google News redirect link never reaches the publisher with curl -L, how to decode a Google News URL with two requests, and the failures and limits we measured.
• 2026-10-10Google Alerts stopped sending emails. What to checkA checklist for Google Alerts emails that stopped arriving: account, disabled alerts, alert options, inbox and spam, Google outages, and switching to RSS.
• 2026-10-09How to build a daily news newsletter from feedsA working daily news digest pipeline: pick sources, pull stories, drop duplicates, get clean article text and send the email. Built and run on one niche.
• 2026-10-08Is there a Google News API? What to use insteadThere is no Google News API. We ran one query through Google News RSS, a SERP API and three news APIs on 2026-10-08 to compare what each returns.
• 2026-10-08How to get a Google Alerts RSS feedSwitch a Google Alert to RSS delivery, find the feed URL, and see what a Google Alerts RSS feed contains, including the google.com/url redirect links.
• 2026-10-06Google News RSS feed: URLs that work, and what they leave outHow to build a Google News RSS feed URL for searches, topics and sites, and the three problems you hit next: redirect links, no article body, duplicates.