In what seems to be an increasingly popular idea, moreover is offering contextual ads in their free RSS feeds, which will probably spark the ongoing discussion around ads in XML feeds in general. According to their press release, "By working closely with the developers of leading RSS readers, Moreover is able to intelligently deliver contextual advertisements through RSS without filling a news folder with advertisements every time a feed is refreshed."

While they're not more specific about the details, it seems clear that some feeds in the future around going to include ads, which makes it seem likely that ad-blocking and filtering technologies that have been created for web...

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Update: It's worth noting that the Atom 0.6 Draft should not be deployed, as noted in the spec itself. This format is only to be used for experimentation or testing.

Niall Kennedy has created an updated Atom feed based on the latest draft of the syndication format, as the IETF Atom group moves forwards towards finalizing the standard.

Even better, there's an updated template available if you'd like to implement the updated draft on your own site.

Trackbacks:

Previous Entry: Interview with Ranchero Software

Next Entry: Verdana Meets Its Match

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Award-winning plugin developer Tim Appnel's just announced the public beta of MT-Feeds, his new plugin for syndicating feed content into Movable Type templates. It's the successor to the very popular mt-rssfeed plugin that Tim had created, and adds a number of cool new features such as Atom support, smarter caching, and OPML import.

Take a look at the latest version, and if you've used mt-rssfeed in the past or are planning to use MT-Feeds, you'll want to throw a few dollars towards the donation or commercial license payment buttons to support Tim's great development work.

Tim has also announced that he's taking over maintenance of Adam Kalsey's excellent stable of plugins, now that Adam has become...

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PC Magazine's Bill Machrone has published a great new column entitled I Blog/I Do Not Blog. In it, Bill examines how blog tools in general, and Movable Type in particular, can function as extremely powerful and flexible content management systems, without all the expense and overhead of traditional CMS applications. A good overview of the potential:

If you have a newsletter, a club or organization site, or an online publication for a niche audience, though, blog software is just about perfect. That's what I needed for a site I wanted to build: something with built-in reader commentary, RSS syndication, template-based article entry, and the ability to make style changes without having...

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For the (many) people who've been saying "let me know when it's done" in regard to Atom, there's good news: XML.com: Catching Up with the Atom Publishing Protocol is Joe Gregorio's primer now that Atom is an IETF standard.

Want to make the case for why Atom matters? Joe's done a good job right at the beginning of his article:

The Atom Syndication Format is now also known as RFC 4287. Atom is an internet standard in the same way that little things like SMTP and HTTP -- also known as "email" and "the Web," respectively -- are internet standards.

Trackbacks:

FeedBurner on the Evolution of Feeds | Main | The Crushing Blow

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MTEntryAtomID

A generated immutable identifier for use in Atom syndication feeds.

Permalink

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Bambi Francisco of CBS MarketWatch (who has her own TypePad site) mentioned the following in her list of holiday gift suggestions:

Speaking of the tech enthusiast, many people are getting into blogging. Blog just entered the Merriam-Webster dictionary this year. Read my Net Stocks column. Your daughter, son, niece or nephew may want their own blog. Typepad.com is offering a special deal to Typepad subscribers. The blog hoster, which hosts my blog at www.bambi.blogs.com, is offering a two-for-one-blog special!

It's not a bad gift idea. Journals are popular gift items. Just think of this item as a hipper, cooler, more advanced journal. They may not only appreciate it, they'll think...

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Creating an Alternate Archive Template

Problem

You want to create a secondary archive template for use in your weblog.

Solution

Create a new Archive Template and map it to an archive type from the Publishing Settings tab.

Discussion

Movable Type allows you to assign multiple templates to an archive type. This allows you to output archived content with different layouts or formats if necessary. For instance, you may want to generate a syndication feed for each category in your weblog.

Begin by creating a new Archive Template. MT uses very descriptive functional names.

To create the archive...

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We've published a page called About Feeds (XML, RSS and Atom) as a resource for people who aren't familiar with the technology to discover what feeds can do.

Right now, the experience of reading and subscribing to feeds is very difficult, not least because there's no consensus around describing the technology or its applications. In publishing this document, we really wanted to make a single resource that's simple enough you could send your clients or customers the link whenever they have a question.

We'll be linking to the resource page in more places in the future, wherever we think users might be confused by the technology. We welcome you to do the same.

Trackbacks:

blogZer...

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We've just posted 25 new blog jobs over on the members-only Professional Network blog, as part of our biggest roundup yet. We'll be working to expand our job listings for Professional Network opportunities soon, as this list was culled from hundreds of blog-related openings that have been posted just in the past few weeks.

We're excited to see so much demand for blog work in general, and Movable Type and TypePad work in particular, and we're welcoming discussion on the ProNet mailing list on what additional resources we can provide to help you take advantage of these opportunities.

Trackbacks:

Previous Entry: Enterprise-Grade Syndication

Next Entry: Why Your Business Needs a Blog...

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2.65 (2003.12.18)

• Added Atom syndication feed template (atom.xml) and auto-discovery for Atom feed to main index template. • Added <MTIfNonEmpty> and <$MTEntryModifiedDate$> tags, and added a exclude_port attribute to <$MTBlogHost$>. • Fixed security issue with XML-RPC server. • Added proper handling of offsets in ISO-8601 dates in XML-RPC requests. If timezone offset is omitted, timestamps are assumed to be in the weblog's timezone already; otherwise, the timezone offset is first applied, then the weblog's offset is applied on top...

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Question

What are all those templates used for? Will I need each and every one, if I want to work with Movable Type? What template should I try to understand first?

Answer

Actually, you do not have to look at the templates at all. If you are satisfied with one of the default templates, or you find a template for download somewhere, you will not have to dig into this subject.

But even if you want to change your weblog's style, you will not have to look into each and every template. Fortunately, most templates are not needed in the beginning. The most important templates are as follows: • The Main Index Template is responsible for creating the start page of your weblog. It is...

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Nick Bradbury, creator of FeedDemon (which was just acquired by NewsGator last week) has just put up a terrific analysis of the considerations all developers of RSS and Atom aggregators and syndication clients should be keeping in mind with regard to secure behavior and sensible defaults:

Even if I'm way off base about how spam will come to RSS, we all know that spammers will find a way to jump on the RSS bandwagon. Given past history, every new social technology needs to think about spam right from the start, or else risk being crippled by it.

Moving on to specifics, Nick adds:

I took a look at how a few of the existing tools were handling them. To my surprise, security didn't seem...

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Question

When I click the Syndicate this site link on my site, I get a 404 error from my IIS server.

Answer

This must be corrected in the server configuration.

Enabling Extension file .rdf in IIS 6.0 • Go to IIS Management Console. • Right click on "local computer". • Click properties. • Click the "MIME Types" button. • Click "New". • Type ".rdf" into the MIME Type extension textbox. • Type "text/rdf" into the MIME Type extension textbox. • Keep clicking OK until you've exited. • Repeat for any other extensions...

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I'm happy I could provide this plugin to the MT community.

This plugin, BigTemplateWindow, is for a really big template editing window. The size of template editing box is only limited by that of your monitor. :) First I developed this just for a big template box. In the process of doing it, several useful features was added. I hope almost all MT users could be a little happy by using this.

Continue reading "BigTemplateWindow" »

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We've all been conditioned over the last few years of using the web to find stuff by searching, instead of having to browse through a hierarchy to find information. Even Movable Type has had, since the early days, a basic internal search and replace feature. But we wanted to go further to make sure that pervasive searching was part of the platform with Movable Type 3.2.

Search (almost) everything

Movable Type 3.2 introduces a whole new search and replace interface. Now you can search not only entries, but a wide variety of items in the application: • Entries • Comments • Commenters • TrackBacks • Activity Log • Templates

What's more, once you're viewing your search results, all the power...

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Sending a TrackBack automatically based on an entry's category

Problem

You want to ping a URL each time an entry is posted to a given category.

Solution

Enter the URL in the outbound TrackBack URLs text box in the Edit Categories screen.

Discussion

As mentioned in the article entitled "Enabling a Category as a TrackBack repository", you can use TrackBack for more than just communication on particular entries. TrackBack pings can also be associated with categories in your weblog.

Likewise, users writing about Perl can set up MT to automatically notify specific TrackBack...

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A couple of weeks ago, I started rolling out a new site design. I still haven't finished. Monthly and category archives, specifically, are still using the old design. Not a big deal, but I'll get to them.

In the meantime, I had come across what I saw as a problem on offering virtual feeds. For those who don't recall (or didn't see), a virtual feed is created by performing a search and choosing the "syndicate results" checkbox. This produces an RSS 2.0-compliant feed of your search. I use an offshoot of this to produce the per-entry feeds, complete with comments, for your subscription pleasure.

The problem is that beacuse these are not files per se, they had no modification date....

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We're taking our first steps towards the release of Movable Type 3.0. The pre-beta version has just finished its initial two rounds of alpha testing and we're now opening the testing to a larger audience (we've picked 300 random addresses from those who applied and will be adding more as time progresses).

The testing that we're conducting will not only help ensure a stable final release but will also give us an opportunity to receive feedback on feature implementation from both users and developers.

Starting today, we'll be giving all of our users much more information on what to expect in Movable Type 3.0.

The official 3.0 release will contain a significant change to the...

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The hundreds of plugins available for Movable Type are what define its power and flexibility for a lot of users, and we've tried to do justice to the creativity and innovation of our plugin developers in version 3.2.

Movable Type's plugin architecture dates back three years to version 2.2. In that version, we added the ability to create custom template tags, and version 2.6 built on that framework by adding custom text formatting plugins and the ability to store data for use by plugins.

In version 3.0, we radically revamped the plugin architecture to support the creation of full applications on top of the Movable Type platform. And version 3.1 extended this power with...

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