Custom Feeds

Beyond Standard Feeds

Most websites publish standard RSS/Atom feeds you can add directly. But sometimes you’ll want to follow content that doesn’t have a native feed, or a feed that requires special configuration.

Finding Feed URLs

Not all feed URLs are obvious. Here are reliable ways to find them:

Check the source HTML

Look for <link> tags in the page’s <head>:

curl -s https://example.com | grep -i 'application/rss\|application/atom'

Common URL patterns

Platform	Feed URL Pattern
WordPress	`https://site.com/feed/`
Ghost	`https://site.com/rss/` or `https://site.com/rss`
Substack	`https://newsletter.substack.com/feed`
Medium	`https://medium.com/feed/@username`
YouTube	`https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=CHANNEL_ID`
Reddit subreddit	`https://www.reddit.com/r/subreddit/.rss`
GitHub releases	`https://github.com/user/repo/releases.atom`
GitHub commits	`https://github.com/user/repo/commits/main.atom`

Use a feed finder service

Paste any URL into RSS.app or FetchRSS to auto-detect or generate a feed.

GitHub as a Feed Source

GitHub publishes atom feeds for many events, which is useful for staying on top of open-source projects:

# New releases for a repository
https://github.com/vercel/next.js/releases.atom

# Commits to a branch
https://github.com/withastro/astro/commits/main.atom

# A user's public activity
https://github.com/dan-abramov.atom

Creating Custom Feeds with FetchRSS

For websites without native feeds, FetchRSS can generate a feed by scraping the page. Paste the feed URL it generates into SparkFeed.

Authenticated Feeds

Some feeds require authentication (e.g., private Substack newsletters). SparkFeed will support a headers field for custom feeds in a future release:

{
  "url": "https://private-newsletter.com/feed",
  "headers": {
    "Authorization": "Bearer YOUR_TOKEN"
  }
}

For now, if a feed requires authentication, you’ll need to find a public mirror or use an RSS proxy service.

Feed Health Monitoring

SparkFeed tracks the success/failure of every feed fetch. You can identify broken feeds by:

Looking for red status dots (🔴) in the sidebar
Opening the feed settings to see the last fetch error
Testing the URL directly in your browser

Common reasons a feed fails:

The URL has changed (check the website for a new feed link)
The website is temporarily down
The feed requires authentication
The server blocks automated requests (check User-Agent settings)