Using RSS in emails

[Madstoffa]

Hi all.

I have seen bits and pieces here regarding RSS feeds and understand how it feeds from external.php etc.

What I was wondering, and if anyone can point me in the right direction is that I would like to send out a weekly newsletter for my site that contains all my items listed for that week. That alone isn't too hard as MailChimp and AWeber can do that.

Where I feel they fall short for my needs is that they only send new listings. From my testing, if I renew a listing, it isnt considered new content, thus is not included in the next weekly newsletter. I want to be able to send the entire contents (all my listings) every week.

Anyone have any ideas of current programs or providers out there that do that, or of any html coding that will let me send my RSS feed using the built in newsletter module (obviously the downfall here is no scheduler).

???

Any information or direction here would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers

[Lhotch +]

The external.php script just builds an xml feed. If that is creating nearly the output you want, then all you would need to do is edit it for content and replace the xml tags with html tags or newlines and breaks for plain text. Then basically add in the mailer calls to get newetter subscribers from DB and send e-mail. Then you could login to your cpanel and set up a cron job to run the script once a week.

[Madstoffa]

Thanks Larry

Now I just need to decipher what you suggested. I'll give it a try. I'm new to PHP and working my way around the site.

Cheers

[Lhotch +]

If you dont know anything about programming in general, its likely going to be a bit difficult. If you have some programming knowledge, just not php specific, then you should be able to pick up php pretty easy.

[Madstoffa]

Any other ideas anyone. I just found out that my host doesn't allow Cron jobs due to "abuse in the past".... How crap is that.

Cheers

[seymourjames +]

Very - try hostgator. 68C works first time every time.

[Madstoffa]

Thanks seymourjames

Anyone have any other ideas thought that dont require using a Cron job?

Cheers

[Lhotch +]

using cron simply automates the task of starting the script. If you cant use cron you could just manually run the script weekly. I am guessing though that if you host disabled cron due to abuse then they will also likely have your outbound e-mail throttled as well. Before you spend too much time working on a solution Id recommend you talk to you host and see what other hidden limitations they may have on your use of a script to send out e-mails.