I was just curious if anyone knew of any software or scripts that could automate what I want to do.

...Let's use cnn.com as an example and say I wanted to create a rss from cnn.coms latest news, which updates throughout the day. Is there any software or scripts that anyone might know of that would check the site (cnn.com) a few times a day, look for an update, and if so, update an rss file?

You could use the existing RSS vB hack and take a look at that code, and instead of creating a thread in a forum use the fopen function to write to a file.