When Posts in RSS feeds age well

Aging Posts and Fuzzy Dates are two of the enhancements to the Ollicle Reflex stylesheet for NetNewsWire.

I’ve been using NetNewsWire for years to keep up with RSS feeds. There are many features that make it my newsreader of choice. One superb enhancement though comes from Oliver Boermans — the Ollicle Reflex stylesheet, recently updated to version 9.

Photo gallery item with the Ollicle Reflex and black NNW stylesheet.

I’ve written before about Ollice Reflex, particularly in NetNewsWire stylesheets make RSS feeds more fun. In that post I mentioned how I like to use it to show photos on a dark background.

This new version adds a couple of appealing features: fuzzy dates and aging posts:

A stylesheet for NetNewsWire that uses clean typography, clever CSS and crafty JavaScript to smooth out the rough edges of feed reading. Now updated to version 9 with some timely new features. …

Fuzzy dates

… Out of the box NetNewsWire shows me the date and time like this “30/10/09 10:47 PM”. With the timeago plugin integrated, Ollicle Reflex uses the new ISO date to dynamically replace this with something friendlier like “about 18 hours ago”. …

Aging posts…

To reflect the fading relevance of [older] posts, Ollicle Reflex will subtely and incrementally alter the background and text colours in a way reminicent of the pages of an old book.

This effect is only visible in the white style and only really begins to be evident once a post is about a month old. The colour continues to brown for a year at which point everything on the web is ancient history.

You can see in my older screenshot that the Default date is in the Day Month Year format. Something like ‘two days ago’ is much more friendly.

And the gradually fading, aging white background on posts is a very nice touch.

If you don’t use NetNewsWire, give it a try. And if you do, then install Ollicle Reflex and enjoy.

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