I put in some work several months back making my sure my site's RSS would work well in a feed reader. This meant making a *lot* of modifications to the [default Hugo RSS template](https://github.com/gohugoio/hugo/blob/master/tpl/tplimpl/embedded/templates/_default/rss.xml). I made it load the full article text rather than just the summary, present correctly-formatted code blocks with no loss of important whitespace, include inline images, and even pass online validation checks:
[](http://validator.w3.org/feed/check.cgi?url=https%3A//runtimeterror.dev/feed.xml)
But while the feed looks great when rendered by a reader, the browser presentation left some to be desired...
It feels like there should be a friendlier way to present a feed "landing page" to help users new to RSS figure out what they need to do in order to follow a blog - and there absolutely is. In much the same way that you can prettify plain HTML with the inclusion of a CSS stylesheet, you can also style boring XML using [eXtensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT)](https://www.w3schools.com/xml/xsl_intro.asp).
The [RSS Templates](https://gohugo.io/templates/rss/) page from the Hugo documentation site provides some basic information about how to generate (and customize) an RSS feed for a Hugo-powered site. The basic steps are to [enable the RSS output in `hugo.toml`](https://github.com/jbowdre/runtimeterror/blob/871be9794234177c1bfa0b1c470873bde8f046be/config/_default/hugo.toml#L19-L30), include a link to the generated feed inside the `<head>` element of the site template (I added it to [`layouts/partials/head.html`](https://github.com/jbowdre/runtimeterror/blob/871be9794234177c1bfa0b1c470873bde8f046be/layouts/partials/head.html#L8-L11)), and (optionally) include a customized RSS template to influence how the output gets rendered.
