Automating the flow of blog posts to my email list with PHP ⚙️

A while back ⁣I decided that I wanted to automate the flow of blog posts to my email list (which is basically nobody right now by the way 😅).

I found that Mailchimp has a feature for automatically sending to an email list based on RSS feed updates on a website.

A RSS (Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication) is a web feed format that allows users and applications to access updates to websites in a standardized way.

RSS feeds are usually generated for you in website builders and other tools but since my site was built from scratch I needed to make my own.

Here is what I needed to do:
— find the RSS feed XML format online
— create a new PHP page on my website in the RSS format
— dynamically populate the RSS feed items with my blog posts from the database
— test the RSS feed page on a validator website
— setup a RSS feed email campaign using the feed on Mailchimp
— design/style the email template
— send a test email to myself to verify