How to add an RSS feed to Conky

Conky is a system monitor that displays on your screen's desktop. It's also very modular. It can display the output of any command line program. You can view RSS feeds by using a the Conky RSS functions, or a separate program or script.

Conky RSS function

 * Function: rss
 * Parameters: url delay_in_minutes action item_num
 * Description: Download and parse RSS feeds. Action may be one of the following: feed_title, item_title (with num par), item_desc (with num par) and item_titles.
 * Example:

RSS scripts
External RSS scripts can easily be run though Conky using the execi function


 * conky-rss.sh: A bash script that parses a standard RSS feed


 * simple-rss-reader.pl: A Perl script that displays the titles of RSS objects

To add the script to Conky
 * Edit: ~/.conkyrc
 * Add the following line below the line labeled TEXT
 * ${execi 300 /the/scripts/location/scripts_name}
 * 300 is the refresh rate in seconds



For an orange motif as shown in the picture add the following lines.
 * ${color orange}RSS feed ${hr 2}$color
 * ${execi 300 /usr/scripts/simple-rss-reader.pl}