RSS integration: turn any feed into cards

RSS is the integration to try first. Almost every news site, blog, podcast host and content management system publishes a feed, often without saying so anywhere on the page. When a source has no dedicated integration, look for its feed before you reach for web scraping.

You give the integration a feed URL. Every new item in that feed becomes a card in the mix you picked.

Find the feed URL

The setting wants the address of the feed, not the address of the website. Four ways to get it, in the order that usually works:

• Guess the standard paths. Add /feed, /rss or /feed.xml to the domain. WordPress sites answer on yourdomain.com/feed almost without exception.

• Look at a section, not the front page. Most publishers serve a feed per category: example.com/politics/feed. This is the better URL in most cases. More on that below.

• Search the page source. Open the page source and look for application/rss+xml. The href next to it is the feed.

• Ask the publisher. For a partner blog or an internal CMS, the person who runs it can tell you in a minute what you would spend twenty minutes guessing.

A correct feed URL looks wrong in a browser. Instead of the site's design you get a plain list of items, or a page of raw XML. That is the confirmation you have the right address.

Prefer a section feed over a site-wide one

A site-wide feed carries everything the publisher publishes. For a national news site that can be two hundred items a day, and your mix becomes unusable within a week.

A section feed carries one topic. It arrives pre-filtered, at a volume a feed can carry, and it needs no editorial cleanup afterwards.

The rule of thumb: if the source publishes more than a handful of items a day and you only want part of it, find the section feed. If the source publishes twice a week, the site-wide feed is fine.

The feed decides what your cards look like

This is the part people are surprised by. tchop shows what the feed carries, and feeds differ:

• Full-text feeds carry the whole article. Cards get a real summary.

• Summary feeds carry a headline and two lines. Cards get two lines.

• Title-only feeds exist. Cards get a headline and a link, nothing else.

None of that is a setting on our side. It is decided by whoever publishes the feed. Open the feed in a browser before you commit to it and you will know what your cards will look like.

The same goes for images. A feed that carries an image per item produces cards with pictures. A feed that does not produces cards without them.

Feed length caps your backfill

Most feeds only list the newest 10 to 20 items. Whatever you choose under Fetch last cards, the integration cannot reach past the end of the feed.

Set backfill to 50 on a feed that lists 15 items and you get 15 cards. That is not an error, and it cannot be fixed by re-running the import. There is no archive behind an RSS feed to reach into.

If you need history, add the older items by hand once, then let the integration take over from there.

When RSS is the wrong choice

• The source has no feed. Some sites have dropped RSS entirely. Use web scraping instead.

• You want the article body inside your app. RSS gives you what the feed gives you. Web scraping with a long post can pull the full body, where you have the rights to reproduce it.

• The source is a social account. X, Bluesky, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and LinkedIn all have their own integrations that read those platforms properly.

When a feed stops working

The integration went to Error and the URL still opens fine. Check that it opens as a feed, not as a page. A site migration often keeps the old address alive as a redirect to a normal web page.

Cards stopped arriving but the status is Active. The publisher may have stopped updating that feed while leaving it online. Check the newest item date in the feed itself.

Cards have no text. A summary or title-only feed. Nothing to fix on our side. Either accept short cards or switch that source to web scraping.

Everything arrived at once, months of it. A publisher rebuilt their feed and re-dated the items. Delete the cards you do not want. The dedup check works on items, not on dates.

Nothing arrived after a redesign, no error. Some sites answer with an empty but valid feed. It looks healthy and delivers nothing. Compare against the feed in a browser.

RSS questions we get

Can I connect an internal feed that needs a login? No. The feed has to be reachable without authentication.

Can two feeds go into the same mix? Yes. Combine as many sources as you like in one mix. The same feed twice in the same mix is rejected.

Can I filter a feed by keyword? Not in the integration. Pick a narrower section feed, or curate the mix afterwards.

How fast do new items appear? Within about half an hour. Every source is checked on the same interval. For anything time-critical, create the card by hand.

What happens if I delete the integration? The sync stops and every card it created stays in the mix.

Does a paused integration catch up when I resume it? No. It picks up from the items it finds when it runs again.

A one-minute check before you connect

Open the feed in a browser and check three things: it renders as a list of items, it carries enough text to make a decent card, and its newest item is recent. That takes a minute and saves the cleanup.

Then see How integrations work for what mix, name, backfill and auto-publish do, since those are the same for every source type.