Recently, I came across a post by Robb where he styled his RSS feed in a way that a person could read, instead of a machine readable .xml file.
Styling the RSS feed is possible with the help of XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations), which transforms our .xml file into other document types, such as HTML.
First, I added an xml-stylesheet processing instruction inside my feed.xml file. Right below the line containing the xml version.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<?xml-stylesheet href="/feed.xsl" type="text/xsl"?>
Then, in the same directory as my feed.xml file, I created a file called feed.xsl and added the following content.
---
layout:
title: 'RSS Feed'
permalink: "/feed.xsl"
---
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="3.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/">
<xsl:output method="html" version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" indent="yes"/>
<xsl:template match="/">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en">
<head>
<title>{{ page.title }} - {{ site.title }}</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"/>
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0"/>
<meta name="color-scheme" content="dark light"/>
{% include style.html %}
</head>
<body>
{% include header.html %}
<main>
<h1>
<!-- Feed-icon.svg: unnamed (Mozilla Foundation)User:Jahoe (GPL <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>, LGPL <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl.html>, MPL 1.1 <https://www.mozilla.org/MPL/1.1/>, MPL 1.1 <https://www.mozilla.org/MPL/1.1/>, GPL <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html> or LGPL <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl.html>), via Wikimedia Commons -->
<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" version="1.1" style="vertical-align: text-bottom; width: 1.2em; height: 1.2em;" id="RSSicon" viewBox="0 0 8 8">
<title>RSS feed icon</title>
<style type="text/css">
.button {stroke: none; fill: orange;}
.symbol {stroke: none; fill: white;}
</style>
<rect class="button" width="8" height="8" rx="1.5" />
<circle class="symbol" cx="2" cy="6" r="1" />
<path class="symbol" d="m 1,4 a 3,3 0 0 1 3,3 h 1 a 4,4 0 0 0 -4,-4 z" />
<path class="symbol" d="m 1,2 a 5,5 0 0 1 5,5 h 1 a 6,6 0 0 0 -6,-6 z" />
</svg>
Web Feed
</h1>
<p class="tip">
<strong>This is a web feed,</strong> also known as an RSS feed. <strong>Subscribe</strong> by copying the URL <mark>https://abf.li/feed.xml</mark> into your newsreader.
</p>
<table>
<thead>
<tr>
<th>Latest Posts</th>
<th style="text-align: center;">Published</th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
<xsl:for-each select="/rss/channel/item">
<tr>
<td>
<a target="_blank">
<xsl:attribute name="href">
<xsl:value-of select="link"/>
</xsl:attribute>
<xsl:value-of select="title"/>
</a>
</td>
<td style="text-align: center; white-space: nowrap; width: 50px;">
<xsl:value-of select="substring(pubDate, 0, 18)" />
</td>
</tr>
</xsl:for-each>
</tbody>
</table>
</main>
<footer>
<p>
{{ site.author.copy}} <a href="{{ site.author.mastodon }}" rel="me noopener" target="_blank">{{ site.author.name }}</a>
~ Content licensed under <a href="{{ site.license_url }}" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" target="_blank">{{ site.license }}</a>.<br />
Last modified: {{ site.time | date: "%B %-d, %Y" }}.
</p>
</footer>
</body>
</html>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>
This code was based on Pretty Feed v3, but I removed all the css that was adding unnecessary load, and then I simplified it so that the page shows just the site header, a banner about the web feed, and a table with the posts.
This is the before and after:
These are nice people who have also styled their feed: