Lowter

Enhancing Opera 9.6's RSS Feed Display

Published on the 9th of October 2008

By Matt Oakes

This blog post was originally going to be about the new features of Opera 9.6 and how much I like them. However, I spotted a major flaw with one of the new features and luckily it's a flaw that anyone can fix with a little bit of modification.

One of the great new features of Opera 9.6 is that it will show a styled page when it comes across an RSS or Atom feed, which makes it readable to humans. It then has a big button that you press to subscribe to the feed. It's a great little feature... assuming you use the built-in feed reader. The major flaw is that it only has a subscribe button for the built-in reader and not for any other services, such as Google Reader (which I use daily). I decided to see if this was fixable and dove straight into the configuration section. (Head to opera:config to see this for yourself.)

In the configuration, there is a setting called "Webfeeds HTML Template File", which is basically an HTML template that styles the entire feed display page. Upon looking in this file, I saw that it was simply an HTML file with some CSS and a lot of JavaScript. Therefore, I decided it was possible to add new buttons and other little goodies; so that's what I've done!

Once you follow the instructions below, you will be given five different options of feed readers to use with only the click of a button. At the minute these are:

• Google (Reader and iGoogle)
• My Yahoo!
• Bloglines
• NewsGator
• Built-in Opera reader

If you have any requests for different readers to be added, them drop a comment in the text box below and I'll see what I can do!

Installation

1. Download the ZIP file (external link).
2. Copy the HTML file into a folder on your computer. It can be anywhere, but make sure you know how to browse to it. Opera's user style folder is a good place to put it (C:Program FilesOperastylesuser on Windows and /Users/your_username/Library/Preferences/Opera Preferences/Styles/user on Mac OS X).
3. Type opera:config into the address bar in Opera.
4. Type "feed" into the search box at the top of the page.
5. Press choose, browse to the HTML file, and select it.
6. Navigate to a feed to check that it works. Try the Lowter blog feed (external link) and see if you get the five buttons!

Bonus Feature: Auto Redirect

As a little bonus, I have also included a simple little feature that allows you to skip the button page altogether. If you only use a certain feed reader (Google Reader for example) and you simply want the feed to be added to that specific reader whenever you press the feed icon in Opera's address bar, the redirect will just take you straight there. No more clicking buttons!

To set this up, all you have to do is edit line 298 of the HTML file to your chosen value. For example, setting it to google will make the script automatically redirect you to Google Reader or to iGoogle when you press the feed icon.

I hope you find this script of some use and continue to support Opera!

Opera 9. Innovation delivered. Download Now (external link)