A few notes on FeedLight…

• There are two variations of FeedLight, one for use with the Aqua Mac OS X appearance, and another for the Graphite appearance. The two variations are available for both NetNewsWire and Vienna.

• The NetNewsWire and Vienna versions of the style are identical save for one difference: the NetNewsWire version features a fixed header that remains at the top of the window when you scroll. While I had originally planned on implementing this in Vienna as well, the constraints of Vienna’s template system made it unfeasible.

• The NetNewsWire version of the style hides some article details that are normally displayed (categories, author links, and comment links) in order to reduce visual clutter. However, you can un-hide these details by simply commenting out the respective display: none; lines at the beginning of the stylesheet. (Right-click on the .nnwstyle file, Show Package Contents, open stylesheet.css in a text editor.)

Credit where credit is due…

While I consider myself proficient in XHTML and CSS, when it comes to graphical elements, I tend to rely the work of others, and FeedLight is no exception.

The title appearance in FeedLight is an exact reproduction of that of the Spotlight search bar in Mac OS X Tiger—hence the name. The icons used are slightly modified versions of those freely available from Timothy Groves (which are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5), except for the feed icon, which was obtained from feedicons.com.

Some things you probably don’t need to know about FeedLight…

FeedLight began life as a fix for a pet peeve of mine in Vienna. Specifically, Vienna’s template system lacks conditional tags, which means that supporting text for article details (eg. the “Posted at” before the timestamp, the “By” before the author name) could not be hidden when a feed omitted a particular detail. For example, for an article that did not include author information, Vienna would simply display the text “By” and nothing else.

In the grand scheme of things, this is a relatively minor flaw, but it was enough of an annoyance to drive me to do something about it. My solution, which I think is rather ingenious, involved forgoing the use of text in favor of icons, which are attached as background images of the article details. By then making these details inline elements, they would collapse in the absence of content, hiding the icons with them.

A nice side effect of the use of icons is that the style requires no localization, something that is necessary with most other styles because of the static English text inserted through the template.

Not long afterwards, my RSS reader of choice switched from Vienna to NetNewsWire. At this point, I ported FeedLight to NetNewsWire, and polished the style further. I also implemented a fixed-positioned header, something that I had originally planned on doing, but was unable to because of Vienna’s ability to display more than one article at a time (which would result in multiple headers all fixed-positioned in the same place).

While NetNewsWire’s template system is not as restrictive as Vienna’s, I chose to retain the appearance of the style because it’s relatively compact and flexible, as well as good-looking (if I do say so myself).