n8n Rising Topic Reading List from RSS Feeds + CSV/HTML

Discover what’s trending across your favorite RSS feeds—automatically

This n8n workflow builds an n8n Rising Topic Reading List by reading multiple RSS/Atom feeds, grouping stories by topic, scoring momentum vs an earlier baseline, and generating a downloadable HTML brief plus CSV shortlist of fresh picks.

What this workflow does

• Starts from a snapshot using a manual run (or an optional weekday schedule) to capture a consistent “now” window.
• Fetches four public RSS/Atom feeds and waits for all feeds to return—keeping errors and empty feeds visible.
• Filters and normalizes items by your configured date windows, removes excluded keywords, de-duplicates links per publisher, and caps retained items per feed.
• Assigns articles to topics by matching configured topic keywords to each story’s strongest match.
• Groups similar headlines into single stories per topic, then measures momentum by comparing fresh coverage to a baseline window (including coverage-quality warnings).
• Outputs a balanced reading shortlist of fresh stories—prioritizing multi-publisher coverage and limiting selections per topic.
• Exports results as an HTML brief and a CSV file you can download and reuse.

Use cases

• Operators and analysts who want an automated “rising topics” digest without manually scanning RSS readers.
• n8n users who need a topic-aware newsroom-style shortlist across multiple sources.
• Automation engineers configuring recurring coverage checks with configurable time windows and limits.

Technical details

• Manual trigger (and optional schedule) to run feed snapshots.
• Nodes used: set, code, merge, Sticky Note, and RSS Feed Read.
• Setup via a Settings JSON: define the four RSS/Atom feed URLs (with consistent publisher IDs), topics/keywords, exclusions, and time windows (e.g., freshHours, baselineHours, shortlistSize, maxShortlistPerTopic).