rss-it: Kit newsletters as RSS

I’ve created a way to read Kit’s “Newsletter Sites” in RSS. Read on!

I’m a fan of Tom Kerwin & Corissa Nunn’s work. I like reading their articles, which they kindly share for free on https://reach.crownandreach.com/. Sadly, their website doesn’t have an RSS-feed 😩. This means I have to register for their newsletter OR visit the site every couple of weeks to check if they wrote new articles. As my mailbox is already overflowing without subscribing to newsletters I’ve opted for the latter. But now there’s another option!

A stingy cringy corporate choice #

Tom and Corissa use the Kit platform (formerly ConvertKit) to host their website. But Kit is not a website builder, it’s a newsletter tool. For potential readers to find those newsletters, Kit offers a “Newsletter Site”. In Kit’s own wording:

“a Newsletter Site is where subscribers can view the published version of a creator’s broadcasts. You can sign up for their email list, but we currently don’t have an option to notify readers when the creator publishes a new broadcast outside email.”

Sounds familiar?

Let’s put that through the corporate doublespeak translator¹:

We offer a blog, but do not provide RSS because we like collecting email-addresses

No RSS is not an oversight. They know it exists because Kit does offer the consumption of RSS to automatically send articles you write on your own blog to your “subscribers.”

RSS-it #

To solve the problem above, I built one-shot prompted rss-it. This tool parses a Kit /profile/posts page and gives back an RSS 2.0 feed. You can use it yourself at /rss-it.

Currently RSS-it only supports Kit-websites, but I might expand to other websites if I ever find a need. Feel free to send requests or PRs in GitHub if you want to add sites.

Quick uninteresting sidenote: at first I thought I could/should build this with XSLT, but that technology was always obscure and is growing ever more out of fashion. Browsers are unimplementing the code to support it. So I opted for a simple PHP-parser instead.

Aren’t there existing services that create RSS-feeds? #

I found several existing services that offer “turn a website into RSS”, but the ones I found are all paid. Ranging from 3 USD per month (with ads injected!!) to around 10 USD per month. Crazy! People are paying to fix what the website creator should have offered from the get-go.

My RSS-IT will be free for all. Enjoy!

Try it now: /rss-it