To make the text look better than a plain solid color, I took the finished “dugg stories” layer, duplicated it, inverted it (made the white go black), moved it under the white version, and moved it down just 1 pixel. Changing the blending mode and opacity of the black layer faded it in just a little, so as not to stand out. That was all that was necessary to add the shadow. Earlier, I noticed two other things about the Digg title. One, the bottom half of their letters have just a hint of grey. And two, the top left and bottom right corners of their letters are erased just a little. To accomplish the grey, I made a new black-to-white gradient, linked it to the white “dugg stories” layer (to mask it using that layer’s opaque area), and lowered the opacity. To erase the various corner bits, I just used the Marquee tool to select one pixel from each necessary corner, erased them, then used the Fade Eraser Tool command to bring them back to near-opaque.

In the end, it’s all about layering on subtle effects. Fade out parts of the image. Don’t use plain black too much, as it stands out very well. Apply slight gradients instead of solid colors to achieve faint lighting effects.

Hope that answers your questions! :-P

To get it running, I just downloaded Feed2JS, followed the instructions on their site, and customized the output with a tiny bit of PHP editing and some CSS. The only thing I had to do differently was to change the location of the cache files, as they refused to be written to in my /feed/cache and /feed/cache_utf8/ directories. I just moved them up a level (to the web root), and they worked flawlessly.