By Nimish Doshi January 14, 2013
Last year, I put out a Java version of a RSS Input program that was based on included open source to parse RSS. It used the beta version of the Splunk Java SDK to check for duplicates to make sure in a reasonable time period the same RSS link wasn’t already indexed into Splunk. With the GA release of the Splunk Java SDK, I updated the contents on Splunkbase to include the GA Splunk Java SDK jar file and also used a more efficient way to check for a duplicate entry. You can download the distribution on Splunkbase.
To recap, the distribution uses a scripted input to index the contents of configurable RSS feeds every configurable N seconds. You can then use Splunk to look at historical RSS headlines and correlate events with other things that you might be indexing. You can also use the included workflow action to read the article if it is still available from the originator.
We should thank the genius of Aaron Swartz for helping create the RSS protocol. RIP Aaron.