Syndicate this site means that the headlines, a link, and an entry description for each new weblog entry are made available for others to use on their websites or to access through a newsfeed reader program.

What is a "newsfeed reader" program? Rather than manually checking in on each of the weblogs or news sites that you enjoy, you can instead use a newsfeed reader program that will compile all of the latest headlines and excerpts of your favorite sites that have enabled RSS - sometimes known as Really Simple Syndication. With a newsfeed reader you can easily and freely subscribe to content from enabled websites.

For example, say there were several cooking weblogs that interested...

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Robery Sayre's just published a terrific overview of the Atom syndication standard and API, appropriately titled " Atom: The Standard in Syndication". While much of the basic material might be familiar, it's still one of the most comprehensive overviews of the power and purpose of the standard.

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Sam Ruby - The Standard in Syndication - July 7, 2005 06:47 PM[via Anil Dash] Excellent overview.

HOLLOBLOG (ֺε) - Atom: The Standard in Syndication (IEEE) - July 9, 2005 07:43 PM [via Likejazz] Likejazz IEEE Internet Computing ο Atom ǥ Ұ 簡 Ǹ ̴. Robert Sayre, "Atom: The Standard in Syndication,"...

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Now that you've designed your blog, should you syndicate it? Syndication, while it sounds somewhat intimidating, really means nothing more than making your site available in a slightly different format so that it can be processed and read more efficiently. In the most basic sense, a web page itself is, in fact, syndication - you are providing data, and that data is wrapped in a formatting language ( HTML/ XHTML) that tells a browser how to display the data.

While a typical web page is a form of syndication, it's not really the easiest method for gathering data from multiple locations and reading it in the most efficient manner. That's where RSS comes in. RSS has multiple definitions,...

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Question

I just installed Movable Type. On the right side of the start page, there is a link labelled "Syndicate this site". Clicking on it shows very strange text. Is it necessary? What do I need this for?

Answer

Readers come to your website and start reading your contents. However, there is also another way of publication. Syndication is a method for making the content available to many types of consumers.

With »Syndicate this Site« an XML file will be created, which contains URLs, titles and excerpts of your entries. Other programs, for example a so-called newsreader, will collect the XML files from several weblogs and presents the data in its own user...

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Joe Gregorio's posted a new article on XML.com, called Secure RSS Syndication, and the story covers just what the title suggests. Using a regular XML feed, some Greasemonkey magic, and a private key, Joe's able to syndicate data without his aggregation service being able to read it. Cool stuff.

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Mark Nottingham's doing what he does best, creating useful specs, in his post on Making Syndication Enterprise-Grade. The idea Mark's advancing is that feeds need to be persistent and reliably retrievable back to the origin of a blog, not just for the most recent entries.

Mark's suggestions are worth checking out, and we've been thinking along the same lines here at Six Apart for all our platforms, so we'll be following up on these ideas as well.

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Just as the Atom API can be used to publish data to either Movable Type or TypePad (as well as many other publishing tools for weblogs, wikis and journals), an Atom syndication feed can be used to export your weblog's information in a consistent, well-specified format.

Right now, the Atom format is fairly similar to the RSS format in the range of things that are possible, but for many developers, one of the positive traits about Atom support is the documentation for the format.

In addition to an IETF Internet Draft, there's a test suite for clients which support auto-discovery and a feed validator to verify that your feed is correctly formed.

For most people using Movable Type and...

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An excellent roundtable discussion over at DrunkenBlog, with contributions from five of the top developers of desktop aggregator clients for the Mac. Lots of good insights into their perspectives on the future of syndication as well as the thinking behind their applications.

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Question

I just installed Movable Type on a Windows 2003 Server. When looking at the weblog's start page, there is a »Syndicate this site« link. However, clicking results in a »File not found« message. The file does exist. I can see it on the server.

Answer

The file, which has the »rdf« extension, is generated correctly and it is at the correct location. However, your IIS does not yet know the extension. You have to inform IIS about the extension, so IIS knows how to serve this file. You have to do so by creating a new MIME-type.

In IIS Manager open the virtual directory's properties, then open the dialog page »HTTP Headers«, then...

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Jason Kottke's started a compelling dialogue between aggregator client developers, users, and advertisers about the future of advertisements in XML syndication feeds, and whether developers will allow users to block the ads. Many business model assumptions for publishers and bloggers are based on being able to easily distribute ads in feeds, so it's a conversation well worth following.

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ProNet member Brice Dunwoodie review's a fellow ProNet member's work, Tim Appnel's Feeds.App. In Syndicated Content in Movable Type, his article for CMSWire, Brice covers the highlights of the powerful new plugin and ends with some praise for the new phase that plugin development has entered:

On a personal note, I welcome this turn in the community. I think there have been a lot of generous contributions to what we know today as MT the product. Its good to see an effective and collaborative mechanism for invested MT geeks to get a bit o bacon too.

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The RSS newsfeed URLs for LMT have been changed to Feedburner. For the new URLs, see http://www.elise.com/mt/subscribe.php. The old feed urls are being redirected to the new, but you may want to update them anyway.

By the way, if you migrate your feeds to Feedburner, be sure to follow these instructions from Feedburner. (tip from Arvind) Have you found the tutorials at Learning Movable Type helpful? Please consider linking to LMT at http://www.learningmovabletype.com/ . Thanks!

Posted by elise on February 23, 2005 to Announcements | Email to a friend | Comments(2) | Printer-friendly version

Comments

What advantage is there for using Feedburner...

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Anne Chen of eWeek describes how Compassion International uses their XML feeds to spread information within their relief organization. It's fantastic to see people doing important work being able to streamline their communications processes using tools like TypePad and NewsGator.

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Previous Entry: MT-Enclosures, RSS enclosure support

Next Entry: eWeek reviews Movable Type 3.1

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Even more ways to be updated on new posts on Movalog. I've pulled together all my feeds that I generate and have added them to one page. The feeds currently available are separate feeds for Movalog and the Sideblog and a combined set that will display posts as shown on the front page. With the impending release of the directory and forums, two more feeds will appear from each.

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The atompub-format has just been updated with Internet-Draft 05, available as a text document or as just a list of diffs if you want to see what's new in the latest version.

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Tutorials in Alphabetical Order

"Email Me" Contact Forms A Safe Way to Upgrade to MT 3.2 Add Your Links Here Adding a Footer Adding a Sidebar - MT3.1 and Earlier Adding a Sidebar to the Default Archive Templates Alphabetize Your Entries Amazon Web Services An Overview of the MT Program File Directories Applying MT3 Style Templates to MT2.X Background Patterns Backing Up Your Blog Banner Images Blog Maintenance Blogger Audioblogging with Movable Type CGIWrap and suEXEC Category Archive Pages Category Customizations Closing Comments Colors - Background, Banner, Headline, and Font Colors - Experimenting With, Using MTSetVar and MTGetVar Combining Multiple Blogs Into One Concerning Spam Converting from Fixed to Fluid Style...

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Movable Type uses a template system to generate the pages of your weblog. To change which content elements and how they are displayed on the pages of your blog, you need to make changes to the appropriate templates.

Selecting "Manage Templates" from the sidebar navigation in your weblog edit screen will show you the list of templates, but what do they all do? And, if you are trying to conserve storage space on your server, are there any you can delete?

Index Templates

Index templates have individual output files, specific to the template. Let's go down the list.

Click on image to enlarge

• Atom Index - The Atom Index produces an Atom syndication feed, atom.xml for those...

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Atom is a standardized format for describing weblog content. With a standard format, you can exchange weblog content not only between web services but between command line tools--that's the idea behind some Java programs called "atomflow." To the same end as the atomflow project, I'm delighted to present a Perl module for creating command line Atom tools. I'm using it to post Flickr photos to a TypePad sidebar, but I'm sure you'll have many more ideas for it.

XML::Atom::Filter

The Atom format is being designed as a lingua franca of weblog content. Recognizing that a standard format makes meaningful integration between software programs easier, Diego Doval, Matt Webb, and Ben Hammersley invented...

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Updated June 12, 2005. Originally posted in Spring of 2004.

The default Movable Type installation automatically publishes RSS feeds for your weblog. The three formats supported are Atom, RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0. You can find the templates associated with these syndication formats in the templates section of your MT edit screen.

The default RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0 syndication feed templates for MT version 3.x produces a feed with the content in your MT entry body. The default Atom feed template produces a feed with both the entry body and the extended entry. The default RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0 feeds in MT version 2.661 generated feeds with only the entry excerpt.

You may or may not want to...

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I've assembled some templates to build a photo gallery with Movable Type. What makes mine different and special from all the others? Easy: it's compatible with MT version 3.2. That means it'll work with the StyleCatcher plugin and the Movable Type Style Generator!

The only special requirement to use these templates is PHP. PHP is used to calculate the image size. The plugin Better File Uploader - with its For Photo Gallery button - will make adding photos go much quicker.

I've created a small example gallery, if you're interested in seeing the result before trying it yourself.

Setup a New Weblog

First, you'll want to create a new...

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