Fulltextrss for Substack Newsletters

Tools I Used

• kill-the-newsletter.com
• full-text-rss

I subscribe to several newsletters on Substack. I like the writers' content enough that I pay for the content, but I don't want to use the Substack RSS app or read the newsletter within an email app. The experience is much worse than using an RSS reader, but there's no easy way to get the full content into a usable RSS feed.

I already self-host several other services on a home server and a VPS, so adding in another wasn’t a big deal (the wonders of Docker!). The full-text-rss service is the one that I self-host. kill-the-newsletter.com can also be self-host, but I wasn’t able to get it running successfully. Since there is a public instance I didn’t worry about it too much.

The problem I had with the RSS feed directly from kill-the-newsletter.com is the formatting was off. The Substack email newsletters are formatted in email as most email is these days, and kill-the-newsletter didn’t always handle is well. It had all of the text, but it would be in a narrow column down the center of the page. To fix this problem I added full-text-rss to the chain. This strips the HTML formatting, and I ended up with a usable RSS feed that is just the text of the article, and it can be used in any RSS reader.

graph LR
A[kill-the-newsletter.com] --> B;
B[full-text-rss] --> C;
C[Usable RSS feed];