Recently in Feeds Category

Have you ever wanted an easy way of showing a simple feed of your favorite sites within your blog? Blogger has a cool new feature called Blog List for Blogger blogs, and even if you are using Movable Type, or another blogging platform, you can make use of this Blogger feature to pull feeds into your blog.

Here's what it looks like on my site - Simply Recipes: Food Blog Updates:

Which is driven off of this Blogspot page: http://foodbloglinks.blogspot.com/.

It's very easy to set up. Here are the steps in detail:

Creating a custom button for your blog to be used on the Google Toolbar is a great way to promote your blog. Once installed, the button can act as a graphical bookmark to your site. You and your readers can search your site using the search bar in the Google toolbar, without having to be on your site. In fact, you can highlight any text on any web page, click on your custom icon in the browser, and you will perform a search the text you just highlighted on your blog. The custom button can even list your last several entries, with data pulled from your feed.

I recently updated my Google toolbar for Simply Recipes and created a new one for a new site, Food Blog Search. (If you want to see the Google Toolbar in action, follow the instructions to add a button on the Food Blog Search site.) Google's instructions for making a custom button can be convoluted and overwhelming. It took me several hours over several days to work out the correct code for the toolbars. So to save any of you similar pain, I'm presenting the steps here.

Step 1: Install Google Toolbar

The Google Toolbar requires using either IE or Firefox for your browser. Go to this page at Google to install it.

Over the last few years, the term beta has been somewhat misused. It used to be that when you used beta software, you expected to encounter problems. But when Google started throwing around the term for its offerings, people came to expect that beta software wasn't so bad. Still need an example? Despite Gmail arguably being the leader in web-based email systems, it's had that tag for more than two years.

There are plenty of examples, but hopefully you get the point I'm trying to make - that beta just doesn't mean what it used to. So there really shouldn't be a surprise that people install beta software. It used to be that only a certain crowd would install beta software, but these days, just about everyone will do so, thinking that they can expect to get what they have come to expect. That's not always the case, as sometimes you can get nasty surprises.

The default Atom feed that ships with Movable Type is a full feed. It publishes your entire blog entry, not just the Main Entry Body or an excerpt. Although many people prefer full feeds, sometimes using a partial feed (publishing just part of the entry in the feed) is appropriate. For example, if your blog is commercial and your business model depends on getting readers to your site where they can view ads, then you might want to publish a partial feed, giving feed readers enough content to be interested to click through to your site. Also, if you publish a partial feed, feed aggregators and content slurpers will be less able to lift your content in its entirety. A key benefit to including a "Continue Reading 'Name of Entry'" link in your partial feed, is that when feed aggregators pick up and republish your content, it will include a link with SEO-friendly anchor text back to your site.

To turn your full Atom feed into a partial feed, all you have to do is remove one line of code from the feed template. Towards the bottom of the template where it says:

    <content type="html" xml:lang="<$MTBlogLanguage ietf="1"$>" xml:base="<$MTBlogURL encode_xml="1"$>">
        <$MTEntryBody encode_xml="1" convert_breaks="0"$>
        <$MTEntryMore encode_xml="1" convert_breaks="0"$>
    </content>

Remove this line:

<$MTEntryMore encode_xml="1" convert_breaks="0"$>

and save and publish your template. This will produce a partial feed, with the Entry Body as the part of the content that gets published to your feed.

The next step is to add a "Continue reading NAME OF ENTRY" link, so that in your readers' feed reader program they can see that there is more content if they click through.

Everyone loves full text RSS feeds; they make reading blogs so much more convenient. The downside for the creator of the feed is that RSS makes it incredibly easy for anyone to pull content from a feed and publish it on a website, without the explicit permission of the content creator. If you publish a full feed, all of your content can be put on someone else's site. There are now automated programs that search the web for feeds, aggregate them based on subject matter, and publish them onto websites with the sole purpose of earning a few Adsense bucks from those who find the site through search engine results.

Many bloggers won't care. But if you make any Adsense revenue yourself from the content on your site, or you enjoy high Google page rank for your pages, it might bother you to find the content that you spent hours creating appearing on these essentially scam sites.

Do you know that your work is protected by copyright law, even if you don't put a copyright notice on your site? It is, unless you have released your content under a Creative Commons license, and then it is subject to the terms of that license. Photography, original literary works (like the words on this entry), original graphics, are all protected. Methods, recipes, basic 1-2-3 instructions aren't. (They are protected under Patent law, if you choose to file for a patent.)

So, what to do.

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 publish full feeds for your weblog. There is an ongoing debate about this as avid weblog readers who use newsfeed readers generally prefer to get the full feeds of the weblogs they read. The flip side for the weblog publisher is that publishing full entry feeds can use up more bandwidth from your webhost, unless you use a service like Feedburner to host your feeds. Also, once you release all of your content in a full feed, it is very easy for an aggregator to automatically pull all of your content into their pages. Even if you have copyright protection noted on your entries, that may not stop people from using your content to create their own automatically generated portal sites. It is up to you, the weblog publisher, to determine how much of your content you want to make instantly and easily available to others without requiring them to come to your website.

Here are some simple changes you can make to your feed templates to generate a full entry feed, including the extended entry, to reduce the Atom feed to only the entry body, to create an RSS feed for a specific category or by using your RSS 2.0 template to include comments with your feed.

One of the great things about RSS is that you can display, or "feed" in, headlines and content from other people's websites directly onto your own website. In another article, we've already covered what "syndication" is, and RSS, and how you can use a newsfeed reader to efficiently read and browse through the latest content from your favorite weblogs and news sites. The focus of this article will be on the other main use of RSS - feeding external content into your site.

How do you incorporate RSS feeds into your Movable Type website?