published on 09 March 2021
So these services that turn a newsletter into an RSS Feed have been around for some time now.
Odds are, if you use an RSS reader, you probably know about services like kill the newsletter that receive the newsletter for you and turn that into an Atom feed. But recently I discovered that Mailchimp, a service widely used for newsletter creation and management (in fact, I can’t even remember the last time I encountered a newsletter that wasn’t hosted on Mailchimp), publishes all newsletter items in an archive listing which has RSS feeds.
Because these feeds are rarely advertised and depending on how a website manages the sign-up process, you have to do some digging and URL copy-pasting.
If they send you directly to mailchimp, the URL looks something like this:
https://WEBSITENAME.NODE.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=ABC&id=XYZThat’s probably the easiest way to get the needed u and id parameters.
If their sign-up involves typing your email address into a magic box on their site, just use a 10 minute mail and get the values from clicking the link they send.
Then you plug them into this URL, make sure to use the same NODE:
https://NODE.campaign-archive.com/feed?u=ABC&id=XYZAnd that’s it, bloated HTML mails in your feed reader, yay! By the way, this should be obvious, but your reader kind of needs to have HTML support or else it’ll just be a wall of HTML and CSS code.
I don’t know, it feels more pure to not have a proxy service (so to speak) between the source and my feed reader, it’s probably also faster, depending on when your RSS reader fetches feeds.
Someone could probably automate this, but then again it takes 2 minutes at most per feed and that’s not too bad.