RSS

I have been studying up on RSS (Really Simple Syndication) in support of another blog-based project that I have got bubbling on the back burner (re-purposing a classic public domain work, using the MT engine in what I hope is a unique and useful manner). Not fully understanding RSS feeds, I had chosen to remain blissfully ignorant, hoping that the default RSS templates in Movable Type 3.x were “good enough.”

Unfortunately, for those who actually browse blogs via RSS, these default templates have one major annoyance and one minor one. The limitation that the default feeds load only an excerpt of each post, rather than the entire post is apparently a major pain. The second, minor annoyance is that the default feeds do not include comments; I was on the fence about whether to include these.

First I downloaded an RSS reader so that I could see what my three feeds (RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, and Atom) actually look like. Shrook is a free and popular (with good reason) RSS reader for Mac OS X. I then took bits and pieces of understanding from Learning Movable Type’s article on “Simple RSS Customizations” and “Full Posts + Comments RSS Template for Movable Type” by etc. (with the lion’s share of the code from the latter).

Since there does not yet seem to be a standard for RSS feed “best practices,” I just decided to be a total copycat. So my…

• RSS 1.0 feed (http://www.notmike.com/index.rdf) - has just the last 20 entry excerpts
• RSS 2.0 feed (http://www.notmike.com/index.xml) - has the last 20 full entries with full comments
• Atom feed (http://www.notmike.com/atom.xml) - has just the last 20 full entries