Don’t let that ugly XML frighten away your readers! Dress it up a little bit. Today you will learn just how to do this with CSS.

As more and more non-techie websites offer syndication feeds, a growing number of non-technical readers are clicking on the links and filling their screens with confusing XML. The current method of subscribing to a feed–copying the URL from the link and pasting it into your newsreader application–isn’t obvious to the new user. Filling their screens with markup or malformed text doesn’t help endear your readers to your site’s new feature.

But syndication content doesn’t have to look like geeky markup or malformed text in your browser. You can make it look quite pretty, and give clues to what the feed is actually for.
How It Works

To make your RSS feed look pretty, you add a stylesheet to the feed. There are two types of stylesheets you could use here. The first, using XSL, is more complicated, but does give the potential for some powerful features; you could convert links within the feed into clickable links in the browser, for example. [Read the rest]