The attention economy craves immediacy and ubiquity, newsletters pushed to your email is its answer to RSS1, and gosh darn it there’s a lot of good content.

But I still prefer catching up with a feed reader. Especially now that NetNewsWire supports iCloud syncing. It’s a dream.

André and I were using Kill The Newsletter! to solve this problem; it’s basically an email to RSS relay service. Other people must have been using it too, because after a while newsletters weren’t making it into our feeds reliably.

“we gotta build a better system”, I said

“I wonder if I could get this working in an hour”, André replied

The next day he had a prototype working2, and the day after that it was basically ready for production—feedyour.email was born. Name your feed, hit the button, and the site produces feed links for your reader and an email address for the newsletter.

The next week or two brought more features, like support for emails bounced into feeds using mail rules and feed-specific favicons. It’s really good.

As a side benefit, this exercise also gave me some exposure to modern web development3, which was fun and led indirectly to this blog.

(P.S. André wrote something about feedyour.email too)

  1. I’m using “RSS” as a generic term; nearly everything is Atom or JSON nowadays ↩

  2. It took two hours ↩

  3. The websites I’m responsible for are still hosted on a VPS and use tables for layout 😬 ↩