1. You Need Graphical Assets

The RSS Reader Widget supports three (3) elements; one (1) of which is a graphic and two (2) of which are colors:

Item No	Name	Description	Preview
1	Branding Banner	A 480x75px JPG file used for the header bar of the RSS Reader. Make sure that logos are centered and no wider than 150px; the banner is centered and both sides will be cropped to the width of the widget.
2	Primary color (Background)	A hex code for the background color of the widget; seen in the header (visible only if there is no brand to cover it up) and footer area.	0x666666
3	Accent Color (Border)	A hex code for the border color used for the dropdown navigation and the border around the content area.	0x94c602

Widget Without Skin		Widget With Skin

2. Creating a Skin File

The skin file works similarly to a CSS file. You must now create a .skin file that contains the assets from Step 1

Name	Type	Description	Value
brand	Graphic	URL of Assets No.1	http://downloads.thespringbox.com/skins/thespringbox.jpg
bg	Color	A hex code Assets No.2	0x666666
border	Color	A hex code Assets No.3	0x94c602

http://downloads.thespringbox.com/skins/thespringbox.skin
<?xml version="1.0"?> <skin> <asset name="banner" type="graphic" value="http://downloads.thespringbox.com/skins/thespringbox.jpg" /> <asset name="bg" type="color" value="0x666666" /> <asset name="border" type="color" value="0x94c602" /> </skin>

3. Upload and Test Your Files

Now you should have 2 files: the .skin file and your banner.jpg. Upload them to your server and test them in the browser. Do this by first opening the .skin file. If it loads make sure to copy down the URL. Next copy/paste the banner.jpg URL from the .skin file into your browser. If the graphic comes up, you are ready to move on to the next step.

4. How to Tie the Skin to Your Feed

In order to skin the RSS Reader Widget, you must now include the URL of a skin file into your RSS feed. This is done using the skin tag in the thespringbox namespace.

In order to avoid seeing an error you should also include the xmlns declairation seen in the <rss> node below.

http://www.thespringbox.com/rss/rssreader.xml
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <rss xmlns:thespringbox="http://www.thespringbox.com/dtds/thespringbox-1.0.dtd" version="2.0"> <channel> <title>Welcome to TheSpringBox</title> <link>http://www.thespringbox.com/</link> <description></description> <thespringbox:skin>http://downloads.thespringbox.com/skins/thespringbox.skin</thespringbox:skin> <copyright>Fox Interactive Media Labs</copyright> <language>en-us</language> ...

5. Adding a Cross Domain Policy File

If your skins are not showing up and you've verified that all assets are properly uploaded to your server, you may not yet have a crossdomain policy file in place. Please see How to... Add a Cross Domain Policy File for more.