Tuesday Tech Tip: Substack and RSS feeds

TL;DR: every substack has an RSS feed automatically, just put the root of the substack into your feed reader and it works!

With twitter in the final throws of having drunk from the wrong grail, I’ve been retooling my RSS feeds and such. Two years ago my main feeds were my RSS reader and twitter; I hadn’t realized how many RSS feeds had changed location or rotted away since I last did any weeding as most of those folks I also followed on twitter.

Substack seems to be the preferred location for folks looking to stand up a new web presence, and email newsletters are in. And that’s all fine, but my email client is just not where I want to read what we used to call blog posts.

I kept wishing there was an (easy) way to route newsletters to my feed reader, but there’s no obvious UI on substacks around feed locations or RSS subscriptions or anything.

And, I may be the last person on the web to learn this fact, but it turns out all substacks have an RSS feed built right in at /feed. Sane RSS readers will take the root URL of the substack and find it automatically. I guess this is one of those cases where RSS is such a foundational base layer to web tech that it’s one of the “batteries included” and it’s not worth advertising.