Killing Ads in RSS Feeds in Vienna

Almost five years ago (in mid-2007) I wrote about how to kill ads in RSS feeds in NetNewsWire. That technique has been a lifesaver for me, as I rely heavily upon RSS feeds to stay up-to-date with information and trends.

Recently, though, I started experimenting with Vienna, the open source RSS reader for Mac OS X. One of the first things I noticed was the ads in the RSS feeds in Vienna, so I started searching for a way—if one existed—to bring the same ad-blocking functionality to Vienna.

Fortunately, there is a way.

Here are the general steps to follow:

1. First, create a Styles folder in ~/Library/Application Support/Vienna. This is where you’ll store any custom styles and the CSS code that will block the ads.
2. Copy your ad-blocking userContent.css into the newly-created Styles folder. You can get ad-blocking code from a variety of sources; I got mine here. If the filename is something other than userContent.css, make a note of the filename as you’ll need it in step 5.
3. Download a user-contributed style from here. Unzip the downloaded file and remove the “.viennastyle” extension. Removing the extension will cause it to revert to being a normal folder.
4. Copy the now-normal folder (from which you removed the “.viennastyle” extension) into the ~/Library/Application Support/Vienna/Styles folder. You’ll note a CSS and an HTML file in that folder.
5. Open the folder for the new style and edit the stylesheet.css file to include this content at the top of the file (replace userContent.css with the filename noted in step 2, where applicable):

@import url(../userContent.css);

1. Save your changes and close all files.
2. Restart Vienna. When you re-open Vienna, select the new style that you just installed instead.

And that should be it! It’s really a pretty easy process, once you understand that you have to use a customer-contributed style (you can’t do this, as far as I know, with any of the built-in stylesheets).