RSS Feed to Slack Templates by Use Case

Welcome to Blueprint! In this page, we'll deep dive into the integration of RSS feed and Slack with various templates that satisfy your needs. As always, we'll be using Make.com for integration. Even if you are new to Make.com, all you need to do is open our template, add the RSS feed you want to follow, and connect your Slack account. Simple as that. We have multiple templates on this page, so you might find ones you don't really need. But, even if you want to get started with automation, it's always good practice to play around with them so you get to learn.

Simple Yet Powerful: Send RSS Feed Items to Slack

This template watches an RSS feed, then send an RSS item to a public Slack channel. The tricky thing is that Slack uses an interesting text formatting. It's something like Markdown, but a bit different. As you can see in the below image, l italicized the title and inserted the link there. I also removed HTML from the description, making it cleaner.

Going Deeper: Scrape RSS Feed Item's Content for More Context

The first approach works fine, until you realize that RSS feeds generally only have these elements:

• Title
• Description
• URL

There are some more for sure, but the thing we need the most is missing: The content.

This is mainly because RSS feed works as a traffic generator, meaning publishers are handing out their RSS feeds so that they can notify people subscribing to the feed, and they hope that those people will come back onto their site. If the publishers provide the entire content as well, there's no reason for the readers to come back. That is why we don't normally get the content itself.

Very understandable. But, some of us might still want to access the content first to, for example, summarize the content, then send the summary to Slack. This template below will make that possible.

This template checks the RSS feed of your choice, then takes the URL of the fetched RSS feed item, the makes an HTTP request to the URL to get the content inside, then summarize the content using OpenAI API, then finally post the summary to Slack.

Let's take a look at what the Slack messages will look like:

Oh wait! Slack Actually Has A Native RSS Feed Integration

It's good practice to use Make.com to connect RSS feed and Slack. But, there's actually a way you can integrate them without using any automation tools such as Make.com and Zapier. Let me show you step by step.

First, let's click + Add apps right within your Slack desktop app.

Type is "rss" and the RSS app should show up. Let's click "Add".

At this point, all that's left to do is follow the screens. Let's keep clicking some more buttons.

Then, click the green button that says "Add RSS integration".

Last but not least, enter the URL of the RSS feed you want to follow and choose the channel you want to send notifications in, then click "Subscribe to this feed".

That was easy! If you are someone who doesn't want to learn automation, but needs to integrate RSS feeds and Slack, this is what you are after. Not much flexibility, but easy to set up.