while trying to figure out why images from the site weren't displaying in my feed reader yesterday, i found out about XSLT
and then had the unwanted thought of "what if my rss feed looked more like the website in browsers that support that"
and so, this happened - with the main issue being that i didn't know you had to define the atom namespace in the xslt header and then refer to everything using that. none of the examples used an atom feed as their basis, making it very confusing why it wasn't working - e.g. the header has to be like this:
<h1><xsl:value-of select="atom:feed/atom:title"/></h1>
<xsl:value-of select="atom:feed/atom:subtitle"/><br/>
RSS feed last updated: <xsl:value-of select="atom:feed/atom:updated"/>
as soon as i figured that out, everything else kind of clicked into place with stuff already written
i expect that outside of this post i might likely be the only person to ever notice it, but oh well, i learned something
