Automating the flow of blog posts to my email list with PHP

A while back I decided that I wanted to automate the flow of blog posts to my email list (which is basically nobody right now by the way ).

I found that Mailchimp has a feature for automatically sending to an email list based on RSS feed updates on a website.

A RSS (Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication) is a web feed format that allows users and applications to access updates to websites in a standardized way.

RSS feeds are usually generated for you in website builders and other tools but since my site was built from scratch I needed to make my own.

Here is what I needed to do:
find the RSS feed XML format online
create a new PHP page on my website in the RSS format
dynamically populate the RSS feed items with my blog posts from the database
test the RSS feed page on a validator website
setup a RSS feed email campaign using the feed on Mailchimp
design/style the email template
send a test email to myself to verify

That was a fun, quick project to work on for a few hours and saved me an exponential amount of time in the future.

Anyone have experience with RSS feeds or subscribe to any?