Atom feed monitoring - GitHub Project Releases - just one easy example!

A URL like https://github.com/<owner>/<repo>/releases.atom points to an Atom feed, which is one type of web feed—an XML-based format commonly used to syndicate updates (such as blog posts, news, or software releases) in a machine-readable form. Atom was developed in the mid-2000s as a more rigorously specified and flexible alternative to the older RSS (Really Simple Syndication) format. While RSS remains widely supported and is often the term used generically, Atom offers benefits like stricter XML syntax, better support for internationalization, and more structured data representation—making it the preferred choice for many publishers today.

A really fantastic example is monitoring Github project releases and getting alerts on new versions of GitHub projects.

This is probably where changedetection.io shines the most, in this quick tutorial we'll show you how to remove all the noise/irrelevant information from the Atom feed and just present a nice list of software versions to follow - of which you can setup notifications or whatever it is you desire :)

If you look at a GitHub project’s releases feed, e.g.:

https://github.com/<owner>/<repo>/releases.atom

you’ll find an Atom feed with structured XML entries. Each entry represents a published release on that repo. Here’s what’s typically inside:

🔎 What the Github atom project feed contains

• Title → The release title (often the version number, e.g. v1.2.3).
• Link → A URL to the release page on GitHub.
• ID → A unique identifier for that release (usually based on GitHub’s internal release ID).
• Updated → The release date/time (in ISO 8601 UTC format).
• Author → The GitHub user who created the release.
• Content / Summary → The release notes (whatever was written when the release was drafted).
• Published → Sometimes included, showing the original creation time of the release.

Getting just a list of software versions to follow

For most people, the rest of the data (such as Link, Updated, Author, etc) is not important, we just want the version and name of the release.

So for example use https://github.com/dgtlmoon/changedetection.io/releases.atom

Then I used the following filter under "CSS/JSONPath/JQ/XPath Filters" field under the "Filters & Triggers" tab of my https://changedetection.io login

 //*[local-name()='title']/text()

This little filter will extract just the "<title>" part of the Atom feed .

Then I can see in the "preview", that is all setup nicely :)

   Release notes from changedetection.io
   0.50.10 Added API "recheck tag" and fixing noisy log output
   0.50.9 Bugfix release
   0.50.8
   0.50.7 Favicon improvements and minor UI fixes
   0.50.6 Features, favicon support, minor bug fix
   0.50.5 Bugfix release
   0.50.4 Security update and minor fixes
   0.50.3 Misc fixes and improvements
   0.50.2
   0.50.1 Realtime UI refactor, misc UI fixes Latest

So then you can continue to setup Discord, Slack, Email, NTFY, or whatever other integrations for alerts when that content changes :) You can also customise the actual notification a little too, depending on what you need (like if you want the full text, or just the part of the content that changed)

have fun!