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10 Comments

How to implement RSS on my newsletter/site?

Hello everyone.

So, I am having a bunch of readers/subscribers that has asked for such a feature.
In fact, they want to be allowed to subscribe and read via RSS but in this case, Emailoctopus is still working on it.

I was wondering, because I really want to implement it but I don't know how to approach this...

This is the newsletter.

Any ideas?

Any help is welcome, thank you!

on October 31, 2020
  1. 1

    If you're a dev, maybe check out the spec and generate exactly what you want. It's just XML. https://validator.w3.org/feed/docs/rss2.html

  2. 1

    You can instruct them to use https://kill-the-newsletter.com.

    It turns newsletters into RSS feeds.

  3. 1

    Results so far:

    fetchrss: http://fetchrss.com/rss/5f9d8f03b1b23520916ccb325f9d8eda254bb6215c6a7ca3.atom
    It should be displaying 'description' where it is currently showing 'subtitle' - description is a required field for feeds so that's not ideal.

    rss app: https://rss.app/feeds/7iCzDSRRugqQVrgR.xml
    it has a description field but it's displaying images for that field, which will likely cause an error with rss readers

    There is a feed for your previous posts on substack at https://unicornsfeed.substack.com/feed

    1. 1

      Ok, I got it....

      Then my question is, if the RSS is looking for new content I may not be able to just generate 1.

      Why? Because they are different pages...that do not get updated. Hence I will have to generate 1 for every page right?

      Or what am missing?

      1. 1

        I think it automatically fetches all the articles from a page, so it should be up-to-date when you add a new article. But I'm not sure what happens if your articles span multiple pages eg, can it handle pagination?

        1. 1

          Is a completely static website.
          I am going to wait until emailoctopus implements it...is easier that way.

  4. 1

    You may use an RSS feed generator such as FetchRSS or RSS.app.

    But, when your newsletter provider releases the feature, the feed's link will likely change. A possible workaround is to run the feed through Feedburner and provide its output to readers. I havent tested it and I don't know whether it works though.

    1. 1

      Oh, a generator?
      I will have to dig into that.

      Never heard of Feedburner, headingto it.
      Thanks a lot Paolo.

      1. 1

        You're welcome, I hope it helps.