To turn any website into an RSS feed, including one with no feed of its own, you generate a feed from the page itself. A modern reader watches the page, detects new items, and produces a standard feed you can subscribe to. For sites that already publish a feed, you just subscribe directly. Either way you end up with a clean, structured stream, and you can move all of it between readers using an OPML file.
This guide covers the whole loop. What RSS actually is, why some sites have no feed, the ways to convert a page into one, and how to migrate your subscriptions with OPML so you never get locked into a single app.
What RSS is, in one paragraph
RSS is an open format that publishes a list of a site’s recent items as structured XML. Each item carries a title, a link, a timestamp, and often a summary. A feed reader checks that file, notices what is new, and shows it to you in a timeline. Because the format is open and standard, any reader can consume any feed, which is exactly what makes RSS durable and portable.
The no-feed problem
Plenty of sites you care about never publish a feed. A small business blog, a product changelog, a job board, a government notices page, a niche forum. The content updates, but there is no feed file to subscribe to.
You have a few ways to solve this. They differ in effort and upkeep.
- Write a scraper. Tools like BeautifulSoup or Scrapy let you extract items from raw HTML. This gives you total control. It also means you maintain a parser per site and fix it whenever the layout changes.
- Use a scraping or news API. A hosted service returns page content or articles you then shape into a feed. Less code to maintain, but you still handle structure and deduplication.
- Use an any-website-to-feed reader. A reader generates the feed for you and keeps it updated, so a no-feed site behaves like any other subscription.
The goal is not to admire the scraping. The goal is a feed item that shows up in your reader like everything else.
How conversion actually works
Whichever path you choose, the underlying steps are the same.
| Step | What happens |
|---|---|
| Fetch | The page is retrieved on a schedule |
| Detect | New entries are identified by comparing against the last check |
| Extract | Title, link, and timestamp are pulled from each entry |
| Normalize | Entries are shaped into standard feed items |
| Deduplicate | Repeats and syndicated copies are collapsed |
If you build this yourself, you own every step and every breakage. That is fine when you need bespoke logic. For the common case of “I just want new posts from this page,” it is a lot of plumbing to maintain.
How SparkFeed does it automatically
SparkFeed follows any site, even ones with no RSS feed, by building a feed for you. You point it at a page, and it produces a clean, deduplicated stream of new items alongside your normal RSS subscriptions. There is no per-site parser for you to maintain and no separate scraping service to wire up.
The practical effect is uniformity. A site with a native feed and a site with no feed end up looking identical in your timeline. You also get folders, keyword filters, and the option of Spark AI summaries on your own AI key if you want a quick read of what changed. It is open source under AGPL-3.0, ships zero telemetry, and is currently in early access.
This does not make hand-built scrapers obsolete. BeautifulSoup and Scrapy are still the right call when you need custom extraction or want to own the pipeline. The any-site-to-feed approach simply removes the maintenance for everyday following.
Migrating your feeds with OPML
Once you have feeds, you will eventually want to move them, between readers, between machines, or into a backup. That is what OPML is for.
What an OPML file is
OPML is a small XML file that lists your subscriptions. It captures each feed’s title and URL, and it can group feeds into folders using nested outlines. Almost every reader can export and import it, which makes it the universal exit ramp for your feed list.
How to export from another reader
Most readers put this under settings, often labeled “Import / Export” or “Subscriptions.” Look for an “Export OPML” or “Download OPML” option. You will get a single .opml file that contains your whole feed list. Save it somewhere safe, since it doubles as a backup.
How to import
In your new reader, find the import option and upload that same file. Your feeds and folders come across in one step, so you are not rebuilding subscriptions by hand. In SparkFeed, OPML import and export are both supported, so you can bring your list in and take it out anytime.
A small OPML example
Here is what a minimal OPML file looks like, with one folder and two feeds.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<opml version="2.0">
<head>
<title>My Subscriptions</title>
</head>
<body>
<outline text="Tech" title="Tech">
<outline type="rss" text="Example Blog" title="Example Blog"
xmlUrl="https://example.com/feed.xml"
htmlUrl="https://example.com/"/>
<outline type="rss" text="Example News" title="Example News"
xmlUrl="https://news.example.com/rss"
htmlUrl="https://news.example.com/"/>
</outline>
</body>
</opml>Each outline with an xmlUrl is a feed. The wrapping outline is a folder. That is the entire structure, which is why OPML is so easy to move between tools.
The takeaway
Any website can become an RSS feed. If a site publishes a feed, subscribe to it. If it does not, generate one, either with your own scraper, a scraping API, or an any-website-to-feed reader that handles it for you. Then use OPML to keep your whole list portable, so your reading is never trapped in one app.
If you would rather skip the per-site plumbing and just follow any page, you can try SparkFeed in early access and import your existing feeds with OPML in one step.
