RSS to Email

Sending emails requires too much clicking and typing. Yes, it takes just few minutes every week, but inefficiency makes me miserable, and the miserable feeling lasts longer than the clicking. I love writing, and I do not like dull clicking. Humans hate boring mechanical work, and robots adore it. Right? At least I think so. Let’s automate this.

As you know, Jekyll powers my website. To publish a new page, I just create a file and push to GitHub directly from my text editor. I love the simplicity of this workflow, and I wanted the same for my newsletter updates. Fortunately, you can create RSS-to-email campaigns.

Another thing that makes me miserable is default email templates. They’re too bloated, too generic. They all look alike. Maybe it’s just me, but I rarely appreciate those colorful postcards with fancy fonts. I prefer plain text and words.

Recipe

Fork the Jekyll Newsletter website boilerplate.
Publish your new Jekyll site with your first update.
Validate the new RSS feed. RSS should contain just one item with that newsletter update.
Sign up for Campaign Monitor, if you do not have an account yet. The price starts at nine US dollars per month, and it depends on how many subscribers are in your list.
Go to Lists & Subscribers, then click the Create a new list button.
Give it the name, like Newsletter, and click Create list.
If you have subscribers already, click Add subscribers and paste in your existing list.
Go to Automation, then click on the Setup an RSS campaign link in the sidebar.
Type in your RSS feed URL, and click the Look up button.
Campaign Monitor will fetch your RSS feed and show the items. There should be just one. Click the Use this feed button.
Select your desired schedule in the When to send the emails section and click the Next button.
On the Choose the design page, select Import your own.
Type in a name for the template, say, Minimalist, then in the Import from my computer section click on Choose file under HTML page.
Use my template as an example (change src in <datarepeater> and the content of <rssitemlink>).
Click on the Add template button. Campaign Monitor will check your HTML and import it.
On the Who will receive this workflow? page, select your list and click on the Next button.
Review your campaign on the RSS snapshot page, and click on the Test and wrap up button.
On the Test your workflow page, type in your email address and click Send the test email. Check your mailbox, and if everything looks right, click on the Skip the test button (yes, it’s a confusing button label).
On the Start your workflow page, type in your email address and click Start the schedule.

Done!

If you need to change something, go to the Automation page, select your campaign from the list, then click on the Edit this workflow link in the sidebar.

Template

<!DOCTYPE html>
  <style>body { max-width: 400px; width: 90%; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; }</style>
  <!--[if mso]><table><tr><td width="400"><![endif]-->
  <p>Hi [firstname,fallback=]
  <datarepeater type="rss" src="https://www.romanzolotarev.com/newsletter.xml">
    <rssbody paragraphs="all" />
    <p><rssitemlink>View on romanzolotarev.com</rssitemlink>
  </datarepeater>
  <p style="margin-top: 4em; color: #777777;">
    Sent to [email]<br>
    <unsubscribe style="color: #777777;">Unsubscribe</unsubscribe>

Note: I intentionally omitted certain HTML tags, because I can. There is a hack with table for Outlook. Please email me if something does not work for you, or if you know a nicer solution.

Instead of a conclusion

I spent a lot of time to automate this. I could create a hundred campaigns for sure. For me, it’s probably not worth the time. But would I do it again? Hell yeah! I can’t help but make robots work. Automate everything! And hopefully, this recipe will save a few hours for you and other humans.

As a side effect, I have a newsletter archive hosted on my site, accessible even to those who didn’t subscribe on the first day. Neat!