Using Pico.sh RSS to Email

Recently in a discord community I’m in the topic of email newsletters came up. A handful of the people were switching service providers and needing to figure out some way to send out emails of their posts to some subscribers.

That was a problem I had maybe 8 months ago when my wife was wanting to get easy access to my blog without having to subscribe to RSS and without having to remember to actually load the site. There weren’t quite as many options for this as I’d hoped but I did find one, wonderfully nerdy option: pico.sh.

Pico.sh is a growing collection of development utilties accessible over SSH. Check out their website to see what they offer (which includes a blog and static site hosting). They’ve got great getting started documentation but I’ll just add a few thoughts.

Table of Contents

Initial Setup

Make sure you have access to a terminal.

Most/all of your interactions with Pico.sh are going to be in your terminal (if you are on a mac or linux machine). If you haven’t used the terminal before you might not be comfortable with Pico.sh. This is kind of the wonderfully nerdy part of it for me.

Make sure to generate an SSH Key before starting the signup.

The easiest command to do this is probably just ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -C "your_email@example.com"

Personally, I add a password that’s easy to type and remember but that technically is optional. It’ll ask you to do it.

For just using RSS to Email you don’t need to sign up for pico+.

It’s $12/year for the plus version and is probably worth doing if you love the service but that’s up to you.

Once you are signed up, add an entry in your SSH config file to make using the service easier.

The SSH config file on mac and linux is located at ~/.ssh/config. To edit it, type vi ~/.ssh/config

This will bring up the file, which will likely be empty. Just hit the letter i on your keyboard to enter edit mode and type the following in:

Host pico.sh pgs.sh prose.sh feeds.pico.sh
     IdentitiesOnly yes
     IdentityFile ~/.ssh/<ssh-private-key-file>

Make sure the SSH key you generated above is located whereever the IdentityFile directive points to. This just makes running the commands easier.

RSS to Email Setup

Feeds requires you to create config files for each digest and upload them to the feeds service. That’s it. Read their setup docs here. Most of what I’m writing here can be found there.

A typical feed config file

Make the config text file in whatever text editor you’d like - just make sure it’s easy to navigate to in the terminal and that it is plain text. The file itself should look like this:

=: email email@you.want.to.send.to
=: digest_interval 1day
=> https://some.feed/rss
=> https://another.feed/rss
=> https://more.feeds/rss

You can have as many feeds as you want. I think you are limited to one email per file though. Just make sure that the feed goes directly to the RSS address.

Set the appropriate send time.

The variable digest_interval sets send time. The above example is every day. To do weekly, change 1day to 7day (notice the lack of an s; it’s not a typo). Monthly would be 30day.

By default the full posts are emailed.

If you don’t want that, add this variable:

=: inline_content false

This is “personal opinion” realm but I think if you are going to have 4 or less posts in an email the full content is probably fine but if you are sending monthly and have a bunch of posts you might want to add this for an easier to view digest feel.

To get everything going, you need to use rsync.

On a linux machine, install through whatever package manager you use. On a mac, I think it’s built in. If not it can be for sure installed with Homebrew (see here).

Once it’s installed, the command is just: rsync <file name.txt> feeds.pico.sh:/

Wrap Up

I hope that helps anyone interested! Let me know if you have any specific questions. Also definitely check out the documentation on pico.sh linked above - these are just meant to be helpful tips.