404 Media: 404 Media Now Has a Full Text RSS Feed

Since we launched 404 Media in August, the most common request we’ve gotten from our subscribers is for an RSS feed that contains the full text of all of our articles. We are proud and excited to announce that today, we have finally figured out how to make this available to all of our paid subscribers.

One of the things that I find annoying about Ghost’s membership feature is that full-text RSS isn’t something you can offer subscribers, so this post from 404 Media (who also uses Ghost) caught my eye. Unfortunately, the devil is in the details, and it’s not just a matter of updating Ghost and turning on the feature.

Here’s the excerpt from their post (emphasis mine):

We paid for the development of full text RSS feeds for Ghost-based publishers. Now we can offer them to our paid subscribers, and other Ghost sites can use the service too.

The fact they paid for custom development work to make this happen scares me right off the bat. But then they say that other Ghost sites can use the service too, which is in the present tense and is more encouraging. Let’s read on…

FeedPress was able to take an API used by Ghost to create a single fulltext RSS feed, then was able to create the individualized feeds we needed as well. Outpost was then able to sync these feeds with Ghost’s membership API, meaning that each paid subscriber is assigned a custom feed.

So the good news is I already use FeedPress, and while I had not heard of Outpost before, the cost is within my budget, especially if this means I gain and maintain more subscribers due to the improved experience.

Both FeedPress and Outpost have said they plan to offer this service to other Ghost publishers moving forward.

Well dang. What I suspect is the case here is that FeedPress and Outpost have all the tools available to make this work for anyone, but you need to know what you’re doing to fit the pieces together just right today, and these companies will have a more productized version of this available at a later date.

My initial look over each service doesn’t yield any obvious way forward for me, but I did reach out to 404’s Jason Koebler and Outpost’s Ryan Singel to see if they had more info on how to do this today, and I’ll update this post if I get a response. I’d love to make this happen, so fingers crossed!