RSS Feed Newsletter

This project fetches articles from one or more RSS feeds and lets you send them as a weekly email via Mailchimp. Articles are saved as Markdown files so they can be re‑used for a future website.

Features

• Fetch RSS feeds listed in an environment variable and store them under _articles/.
• Render a newsletter using Jinja2 (or a plain HTML fallback) and send it with the Mailchimp API.

Requirements

• Python 3
• Dependencies from requirements.txt

Installation

python -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate  # on Windows use `venv\Scripts\activate`
pip install -r requirements.txt

Configuration

Create a .env file in the repository root with at least the following variables:

# comma-separated list of RSS feed URLs
RSS_FEED_URLS=https://example.com/rss,https://another.example.com/feed

# Mailchimp credentials
MAILCHIMP_API_KEY=your-api-key
MAILCHIMP_SERVER_PREFIX=us1  # e.g. us1, us2
MAILCHIMP_LIST_ID=your-list-id

# email sender details
EMAIL_FROM=you@example.com
EMAIL_FROM_NAME=Your Name

If python-dotenv is installed (it is included in requirements.txt), the scripts will load this file automatically.

You can customize the email template by creating templates/newsletter.html. If it is absent, a simple built‑in template is used.

Usage

1. Fetch articles

   python scripts/fetch_rss_feeds.py

   New articles are written to the _articles/ directory.

2. Send the newsletter

   python scripts/send_newsletter.py

   The latest articles are loaded and emailed using Mailchimp.

3. Build the Jekyll site

   First copy the fetched articles into the Jekyll site's _posts/ folder. Use the helper script or create symlinks. The script automatically prefixes each article filename with the date from its front matter so that Jekyll can process it as a dated post:

   # copy files
   ./scripts/sync_articles_to_jekyll.sh
   # or create symlinks instead of copies
   ./scripts/sync_articles_to_jekyll.sh --link

   Then build the static site:

   jekyll build -s jekyll -d jekyll/_site

   The generated site will be available under jekyll/_site/.

Roadmap

The repository currently focuses on fetching articles and sending newsletters. Future improvements may include:

• A Jekyll website to publish the collected articles.
• A GitHub Actions workflow to automate fetching and mailing.

Automation

A scheduled GitHub Actions workflow automatically fetches articles and sends the newsletter. Configure these repository secrets so the workflow can run:

• RSS_FEED_URLS
• MAILCHIMP_API_KEY
• MAILCHIMP_SERVER_PREFIX
• MAILCHIMP_LIST_ID
• EMAIL_FROM
• EMAIL_FROM_NAME

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License.