I found a few sites around that give instructions on how to use CSS code to create those classy RSS icons. Using CSS is good for a couple of reasons - if you decide to change the style you only need to do it once, even if the code was used in a post, or page, not just a template. Secondly, some people live some of their life behind crappy corporate firewalls that block images from certain sources, and people using text-only browsers, or using text-to-speech features, will still be able to view what it was you intended them to see.
This is what I have in my stylesheet:
.rss
{
color:#FFFFFF;
background-color:#FF6600;
border-color:#FF6600;
border-style:outset;
text-decoration:none;
margin:2em 0em 0em 0em;
padding:0em 0.5em 0em 0.5em;
border-width:1px;
font-family:Arial;
font-size:0.8em;
}
.rss:hover
{
background-color:#FF9900;
}
.rss:active
{
border-style:inset;
}
Then, whenever or wherever you have a link that needs to look like an RSS button, just use class="rss" inside the a tag, and it will look classy!
It is also possible to format a whole paragraph using a p tag with the class="rss".
If it doesn’t work, then it’s likely that another CSS statement is vying with the class tag for precedence - for instance if your links are inside the sidebar, as part of a list, then the list, sidebar and a tags from the CSS may take precedence. In my case, removing the links from the list item (leaving them in the unordered list to keep positioning) fixed the problem.
Note: I was originally using #rss in the stylesheet, and id="rss" in the pages, but should have been using .rss and class="rss" to be more compatible. The one I was using is intended that each tag appears only once in a document, I think.
Pretty neat
I’m personally a CSS lover, and your idea there is actually worth having a look at. But for now i think i’ll stick to my pixled images 
Cheers!
1 month, 3 weeks after the fact.
I’ve seen some great stuff done with CSS, like flags and the like. The Union Jack I saw once was pretty amazing. I tend not to have the patience to do that - a lot of what I do is just minor modifications on other people’s stuff.
My biggest hate is that various browsers do not allow for CSS styling to be applied to form buttons. IE seems to be the only one to do this, and I don’t use that unless I have to. Which I do at work, but that’s a whole other kettle of fish.
1 month, 3 weeks after the fact.