Feed Link

[arbormoss]

Do we want to have a link to the newsletter RSS feed on the site?

For incoming people I could see it being a little offputting if a link leads directly to the feed. It would probably be fine if either it had the RSS feed icon and was small somewhere or if it was a click-to-copy button.

[jastintime]

It would be really cool of the RSS feed was styled and it was just what is under /newsletter similar to [1], but that might be a lot of work. If a styled RSS feed is a lot of work I'd just go with rss feed text + rss logo svg.

https://darekkay.com/blog/rss-styling/

[1] https://darekkay.com/atom.xml

[arbormoss]

It would be really cool of the RSS feed was styled and it was just what is under /newsletter similar to [1]

I'll look at this and try implementing it.

If JS and added HTML aren't supported, the content likely couldn't be exactly like what's under /newsletter because of HTML and JS features used in the navigation bar. The body of the newsletter could likely be styled to look like the body of the newsletter pages.

EDIT:

I looked at the "Style your RSS feed"[2]. Since it looks like the stylesheets support adittional HTML and HTML links it could likely look close to the version at /newsletter.

Will look into further.

[2] https://darekkay.com/blog/rss-styling/

[jastintime]

https://lwn.net/Articles/1034560/

https://chromestatus.com/feature/4709671889534976

https://developer.chrome.com/docs/web-platform/deprecating-xslt

U might not want to, it seems Chrome wants to remove XSLT which is a requirement for styling rss feeds. Intended removal is also pretty close(November 17, 2026), even if it gets pushed back thats only maybe a few years.

sad :/

[jastintime]

after thinking about it more I think we should do something similar to [1]. [2],[3] where we just provide a linear view of the archive with a small section at the top explaining what an rss feed is, linking to https://aboutfeeds.com/. Styling it the same way that /newsletter is styled would be really nice if we could just replace /newsletter with a styled rss feed but possible browser removal makes this an iffy idea.

I think we should just style the rss feed so its not just raw xml thrown at the user but styling it like /newsletter might be too much if we can't replace /newsletter with the rss feed.

what do you think?

[1] https://brandonrozek.com/blog/index.xml
[2] https://darekkay.com/atom.xml
[3] https://ricardolopes.net/blog/rss.xml

EDIT:
In like with my previous thoughts this is the stylesheet provided by aboutfeeds.com https://github.com/genmon/aboutfeeds/blob/main/tools/pretty-feed-v3.xsl which we could modify to fit our colorscheme.

[arbormoss]

I like linking to about feeds[1] and think we should do that. Using pretty-feed-v3 with our color scheme is good. I agree manually styling it isn't worth it if it will get removed within a year or two and we can't replace /newsletter. Current plan: 1. Add a small explanation of what a feed is and link about feeds[1]. 2. Use pretty-feed-v3[2] to style the rss feed already on the site. 3. Alter the style to fit our branding colors. [1] https://aboutfeeds.com/ [2] https://github.com/genmon/aboutfeeds/blob/main/tools/pretty-feed-v3.xsl

[arbormoss]

#54 now has RSS styling on the feed, and links to about feeds[1].

The styled feed does still just link back to the articles on the regular site, and still works in newsraft[2] and newsboat[3].

pretty-feed-v3[4] says that not having the right content headers may break the styling on Safari on iOS/Mac:

3. Serve the feed with the following HTTP headers:

Content-Type: application/xml; charset=utf-8  # not application/rss+xml
x-content-type-options: nosniff

(These headers are required to style feeds for users with Safari on iOS/Mac.)

I don't have an iOS or Mac device to test this on. If someone else does that would be appreciated, but this is pretty minor.

The responce headers Zola[5] sends are:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
content-type: text/xml
access-control-allow-origin: *
content-length: 80494
date: Thu, 25 Dec 2025 03:43:37 GMT

These are different than the recommended so it might be worth looking into.

[1] https://aboutfeeds.com/
[2] https://codeberg.org/newsraft/newsraft
[3] https://newsboat.org/index.html
[4] https://github.com/genmon/aboutfeeds/blob/main/tools/pretty-feed-v3.xsl
[5] https://www.getzola.org/

[jastintime]

I have an ios device but the zola website hosted on my computer doesn't appear on my phone. I can check it once its in prod.

[arbormoss]

I will look into fixing this. It looks like Zola[1] has a way to insert custom headers with the `load_data` function[2], but this might require altering the build-in RSS feed generator more. We are already altering it slightly to support xml styling (this PR) but we would likely need another refactor to load the actual RSS feed, using `load_data` from another location using a template where the RSS feed is now. Zola doesn't support this by default. [1] https://www.getzola.org/ [2] getzola/zola#1710