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What is this?

Every website that updates routinely should have an RSS or Atom news feed that people (and search engines) can use to watch for changes.

By default, these files look horrible when a human looks at them in a browser. But there is a simple way to make them look better: RSS Style!

Before
Before
After
After

If you are not a webmaster, checkout out What is a new feed? and Picking a news reader for how to get started!

How do I use it?

You need to know the name of your RSS/Atom file. It is usually something like feed.xml, atom.xml or rss.xml. You may be able to use the Feed Analyzer to help you find it. These examples use feed.xml, but you should replace it with the name of your feed file.

Download one of the available styles and save it as feed.xslt in the same directory as your feed.xml file. Note that the extension is .xslt and NOT .xml!

Add it to your feed.xmlfile. At the top of the file, it will look like: 

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<rss ...>
...

Add a line in the middle so it looks like: 

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="feed.xslt"?>
<rss ...>
...

Troubleshooting

Available styles

Questions and Answers

Which file do I add it to?

Your feed file is often named feed.xml but can be anything. You can use the Feed Analyzer to find the URL of your feed: put it your website's URL and it will display the feeds that it finds.

How does this work?

The xml-stylesheet processing instruction tells the browser to use the XSLT stylesheet to transform the raw XML into HTML. This has been supported by all major browsers for a long time.

Why does the analyzer complain about the content-type?

While there are official content-types for RSS and Atom feeds, some browsers will try to download the feeds rather than display them. This is suboptimal (to say the least), so I strongly recommend using the plain XML content type text/xml. You can test how your browser behaves with the Content-Type Testing page.

Links

Examples

Website News Feed Notes
Hacker News (front page) before → after Missing ‘self’ link, No link in home page body. analyze
Hacker News (Show HN) before → after Title doesn’t have ‘Show HN’. Missing ‘self’ link. No discovery link. analyze
Fly.io before → after Bad ‘self’ link. HTML page is missing the discovery link analyze
Jacques Mattheij before → after Bad ‘self’ link (404) analyze
Dave Winer before → after Missing the ‘self’ link. No link in home page body. analyze
Dan Nguyen before → after Opens ‘Save As’ in Firefox. (also no https: support) analyze
Thomas Schranz before → after Different ‘self’ link is different, though it works. No link in home page body. analyze
Colin Wright before → after Already has styling! CSS. No discovery link. analyze
Hillel Wayne before → after Opens ‘Save as’ dialog in Firefox. Mismatched discovery link. No link in home page body. analyze
Patrick McKenzie before → after No link in home page body. analyze
Allen Downey before → after Opens ‘Save as’ dialog in Firefox. Home page link has a redirect. No link in home page body. analyze
Julia Evans before → after Self and home page links are ‘http:’ analyze
Thomas Park before → after Opens ‘Save as’ dialog in Firefox analyze
Kyle Kingsbury before → after Opens ‘Save as’ dialog in Firefox. No link in home page body. analyze
Mark Nottingham before → after Opens ‘Save as’ dialog in Firefox. analyze
Tim Bray before → after Opens ‘Save as’ dialog in Firefox analyze
John Graham-Cumming before → after CSS stylesheet, but insecure so it doesn’t work. Mismatched ‘self’ link but working. analyze
Dan Luu before → after Bad ‘self’ link. Bad home page link. No title. analyze
Steve Klabnik before → after Missing the ‘self’ link. No link in home page body. analyze
Stavros Korokithakis before → after Discovery vs ‘self’ link mismatch but working. ‘link’ element value is in an attribute instead of the content. analyze
Terence Eden before → after Has styling, but not exactly pretty. Home page link has a redirect. analyze
Chris Coyier before → after Opens ‘Save as’ dialog in Firefox. analyze
Logo of the day before → after Perfect, since it is my sample for testing. analyze
Try it on your own feed! Problems?Feed Analyzer
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