Automate Your Content Curation with Slack, RSS and Buffer
Nowadays, Slack is the place where everything happens within your company. Probably, you have multiple channels where your team is sharing content about different topics. Yet those links are spread across different channels and mixed between multiple comments.
When you are focused, working on the next idea that will change the future of your company, your teammates are also sharing great articles: an useful tutorial about React, the last productivity tool, or the best song ever. You don’t want to interrupt your flow and decide to check it out later. At the end of the day, you can’t remember the channel and you miss the article.
The X-Team community is very active on Slack, sharing content about new technologies, how to solve a programming challenge, or inspiring stories about their trips. I don’t want to miss any of this content, and I want to be able to share it with our community on social media.
This week, I automated a process that helps me achieve both necessities. The solution was simple. I just needed to convert my Slack channels into RSS feeds and import them into Buffer and Feedly.
Convert your Slack channels into RSS feeds
All the work and credit goes to Mike Gozzo and his open source project “Slack to RSS”. You can get this app up and running in minutes following these steps:
- Generate a test token to authenticate your Web API requests
- Create a free account on Heroku
- Deploy ‘Slack to RSS’ on Heroku using Mike’s template
- Config the app:
- Add your Slack Web API token
- Add the number of messages to scan in the channel (max 1000)
This app creates an XML feed for each of your public Slack channels. You can access the feed using the URL of your app in Heroku adding the name of the channel at the end. Eg:
https://yourcompany-feed.herokuapp.com/feed/general
https://yourcompany-feed.herokuapp.com/feed/music
https://yourcompany-feed.herokuapp.com/feed/engineering
Now, you can follow your team’s shared content within your favorite RSS reader. This is how it looks like when you add the feeds into your Feedly account.
Curate the content and share it with your community
Most likely, the content shared by your team on Slack is interesting for your community. Now that we have our Slack feeds ready, we just need to import them into Buffer, curate the best content, and share it with the world.
Following these two simple steps, you can keep up with all the articles shared by your team and streamline the process to share them with your community.
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