You Can Create Your Own RSS Feed for Newsletters.
I understand why newsletters have become popular but RSS has not. Most people will never download a dedicated news reader app or spend time setting it up, but everyone has email. This doesn’t change the fact that I personally prefer one RSS reader for keeping up with news and another for managing my email.
The problem for people like me is that most of the best content is only available in the form of newsletters. Fortunately, there is a compromise of sorts. Most newsletter services provide an RSS feed, but if you don’t have one, you can usually just create your own.
Find existing RSS feeds for newsletters
Most of the major newsletter services—Substack, Buttondown, Ghost, and BeeHiiv—offer some kind of RSS feed. And in the case of Buttondown and BeeHiiv, the feed is usually easy to find – just look for the “RSS” option in the header. Click on it to open the feed, which you can copy into your RSS reader of choice.
Other newsletter providers, including Substack and Ghost, do not advertise the RSS feed this way, but do offer it. The easiest way to find the Substack and Ghost newsletter feed is to go to the newsletter home page and add /feed to the end of the URL. For example, if you want the https://annehelen.substack.com feed, you can find it at https://annehelen.substack.com/feed . Copy this and paste it into your RSS reader.
Of course, some newsletters are hosted using different services and may have different RSS feed URLs. In such cases, you can try RSS Finder . This simple web app allows you to paste any URL and get a list of the channels that site offers. Typically, if an RSS feed exists, this service will point to it.
Please note that RSS feeds generally cannot provide you with the full text of any subscriber-only newsletter issues. You should be able to click on a link to get the full content in your browser, but it’s worth considering.
Can’t find your RSS feed? Make one instead
Some newsletters do not offer any RSS feeds. Major newsletter providers allow writers to turn this feature off if they want, and some newsletters run on a custom setting that doesn’t offer any feed. This is where Kill The Newsletter comes in. This free tool, which we covered back in 2015 , can turn any newsletter into an RSS feed.
The Service provides you with a personalized email address which you can use to subscribe to the newsletter in the usual way. It also provides you with an RSS feed that will show you all the messages sent to that email address. Please note that some publishers block this service, so if you’ve set it up and aren’t seeing articles, this may be the reason.