Watches

A Watch is an ambient background job that monitors something — a folder, an RSS feed, or a web page — and summarizes anything new to a notes file. Set one up and forget about it; Ekorbia polls in the background and writes a running log of summaries.

Open the Watches tab in the right sidebar to see your watches. Click + Configure to create a new one, or the pencil icon on an existing row to edit it.

The three kinds of watch

All three kinds share the same notes file, model, and (optional) summarization prompt. They differ only in what they watch and how they decide there’s something new.

Common settings for all watches

Every watch has:

• Name — what shows in the list (free-form)
• Source — the folder path, feed URL, or web URL
• Model — which Ollama model summarizes new events (defaults to your main chat model)
• Summarization prompt — optional system prompt; you can pick one of the included *-Watcher prompts or none
• Notes file — where summaries are appended (defaults to ~/Documents/Ekorbia/notes.md)
• Cadence — how often to poll (in seconds)
• Notify — toggle for native OS notifications when new events arrive

Folder watches

Point at a directory; Ekorbia scans it every 30 seconds for new files. For each new .pdf, .txt, or .md, it extracts text and summarizes via the configured model.

Files that already existed when the watch was created are not summarized — only new arrivals trigger summaries.

RSS watches

Paste any RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, or Atom feed URL. Ekorbia handles all three formats. For each previously-unseen entry, the summary is built from whichever of these is longest:

1. The <content> element
2. <summary> or <description>
3. The article body fetched from the entry’s link (if the feed only ships a teaser)

That fallback to fetching the linked article is what makes RSS watches useful even on feeds that don’t include full content.

Click “Test” before saving to see how many entries the feed currently exposes — catches typos before you commit.

URL watches

Paste any public web URL. Ekorbia fetches the page, strips HTML to text, and only summarizes when the visible text actually changes. This makes URL watches ideal for:

• Release-note pages
• Changelogs
• Leaderboards
• Status pages
• Job listings
• Any page that updates occasionally and you don’t want to keep refreshing

Snapshot mode vs Diff mode

URL watches have two modes:

• Snapshot (default) — when the page changes, the whole new page goes to the model
• Diff — only the added/removed lines (unified diff, 3 lines of context) go to the model

Diff mode is the right choice when you mostly care about deltas — for a long-lived changelog, sending only what’s changed since last poll keeps summaries tight and token costs low.

Diff mode’s first fetch is always a snapshot. There’s no prior content to diff against on the very first poll, so the first summary is always a full-page snapshot. Subsequent polls produce diff-only summaries.

Advanced: CSS selector

If a page has a lot of nav/footer/sidebar noise, you can specify a CSS selector in the watch form to narrow extraction to a sub-tree:

• article
• main
• .post-content
• #changelog

Anything matching the selector is extracted; everything else is ignored. If the selector matches nothing on a given poll, Ekorbia falls back to the whole page — a watch never silently dies from a typo.

Per-watch cadence

Each watch has its own poll interval. The defaults are tuned to be reasonable for each kind, but you can change them in the form:

• Folder: 30 seconds (good for active dev folders)
• RSS: 600 seconds = 10 min
• URL: 1800 seconds = 30 min

There’s a Run now button on each row that bypasses the cadence and polls immediately — useful when you don’t want to wait.

OS notifications

Toggle Notify in the watch form to get a native OS notification whenever new events arrive (macOS Notification Center). Multiple events from the same poll cycle are coalesced into a single banner (“5 new items from My Folder”) rather than five separate alerts. Watches with notifications enabled show a 🔔 in the list.

On macOS the watch form shows a small inline explainer before macOS’s permission dialog fires the first time, so you understand what you’re granting.

Editing a watch

Click the pencil icon between the on/off toggle and the trash icon on any watch row. The form opens pre-filled. Saving runs an upsert that preserves pipeline state (the URL’s last-seen content, the RSS feed’s seen-entry list, the next poll time) — so the next poll continues from where it left off rather than firing a baseline summary again.

The activity feed

The Watches panel shows the activity feed below the watch list. Each entry shows:

• The watch’s kind glyph (📁 / 📡 / 🌐)
• The source label
• The model that summarized
• Processing dots (animated when in flight)
• The full summary, inline (long ones truncate; click to expand)

Chat with your notes

The “Chat with notes” button at the top of the Watches panel opens a new chat with the accumulated notes file injected as a system message. This is useful when you’ve collected dozens of summaries and want to ask cross-cutting questions like “what’s been changing in the kubernetes docs this month?”

Related pages

• Prompts library — for picking a summarization prompt
• Settings — for default watch cadence and notes file path