While still trying to forget I am sick, I hacked up a perl script that would fetch an RSS feed, parse it and sms me the bits of it I want (usually just the title).

It works like a charm. I am using it to sms me entries from the Internet Storm Centre feed. To do this I get cron to execute the following every hour:

rss2sms.pl http://iscxml.sans.org/rssfeed.xml

Pretty straight forward, by twiddling the two config variables at the top you can make it execute an arbitrary program when a new item is detected. You can also twiddle which bits of the feed you want it to send, just look in the code. To do the sms'ing I am just plugging in my commandline sms script.

The rss2sms script is available here. It probably should be named something more accurate, like rss2text_and_run_an_arbitrary_command_when_a_new_item_is_detected, but it just doesn't have the same ring to it.

I fully realise there are numerous better ways to do this, and would appreciate anyone willing to implement one.

UPDATE: Whoops, I wasn't overwriting the item with new ones. That's fixed now.