Have you ever hit one of those little technical challenges that keeps you up half the night until bleary-eyed and tired at 1 in the morning you have finally triumphed over it? And going to bed before figuring it out is not an option?

I had one of those last night. I’ve always wanted to customize the page that is generated by the Aggie newsfeed aggregator. I poked around in the install directory and noticed an Aggie.xsl file. Aha! I had read about transforming XML by using stylesheets but had never explored how it was done.

So what I ended up with several hours later was an xsl/css skin for Aggie that lets you apply any of the standard Movable Type styles (which are beautifully designed) to the output. I also added a sidebar blogroll list of all the blogs with entries displayed on the page. If a feed you subscribe to does not have a new entry then it will not appear in the blogroll since Aggie does not include it in the aggregate.xml output file that gets parsed to create the html page (unless you have checked off the show all entries box).

That blogroll is the piece that kept me up late. XSLT is hard.

Here are the files (right-click on the links to save the files to disk):

Aggie.xsl
Aggie.css (Plain Jane MT style)

Just drop these files into your Aggie directory (back up the originals if you want to be able to revert the look and feel). To apply a different MT style simply open up Aggie.css and swap out all the code for that of the style you want to use.