janchor
I have been using JabRSS as my prime RSS notification service for a while now, but lately it has been offline often. The author told me there were some problems with the hosting of the JabRSS bot. I was really pleased with how it worked, though, and wanted to set it up for myself. Unfortunately I found it to have way to much dependencies for my needs.
In comes janchor by atrus. This is another RSS notification service written in perl. You can register arbitrary news sources with it and later subscribe to presence of those sources. The presence even shows DND when the source can not be reached for retrieving updates. Works great so far and the TODO looks promising.