As always, this information is provided as is, without any
warranty of any kind (inset disclaimer here). You use this at
your own risk. YMMV.
If you are using Movable 2.64 and recently upgraded to
2.65, you may know that there is a new template available.
The template is for the Atom
syndication format feed. Note that if you did a clean
install of 2.65, you can probably skip this entire post as I
assume everything is configured for you. But, if like me, you
did an upgrade install and want to enable the Atom feed, you
may want to read on.
In general, there are two things you need to do to enable
the Atom feed. The first is to get the template from MT. The
second is to edit your Main Index to include an “auto
discovery” link to the feed.
The Atom Template
1. Go to the MT site and look for and
click on the the link to the Atom
Index.
2. Highlight and copy all of the text, making sure
to scroll down to the bottom of the window.
3. If you aren't already, login to your MT
installation.
4. Click on Manage
Weblog.
5. Under Manage, click on
TEMPLATES.
6. Find and click on the link to Create
new index template.
7. Under Template Name type in
Atom Index (I'm not sure what the full
installation official name is so if anyone knows what it
is, feel free to leave a comment below. Although, you could
just as well use Atom 0.3 Index instead.).
8. Under Output File type in
atom.xml
9. Leave "Rebuild this template automatically when
rebuilding index templates"
checked.
10. Leave "Link this template to a file"
blank.
11. In the Template Body input
box, paste all of the text you copied from the MT site
default Atom index in Step 2.
12. Click on the SAVE button but
do not rebuild the files yet.
13. If you aren't there already, click on
TEMPLATES to get the listing of your
default templates.
14. Check to make sure Atom Index
is now listed as one of your templates with atom.xml shown
as the Output File.
Main Index Template
15. Go back to the MT site, default templates
page, Main Index by
clicking on the link here.
16. Look for the following line: <link
rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="Atom"
href="&@60;$MTBlogURL$>atom.xml"
/>
17. Highlight and copy that line. Note where this
line is in relation to the other lines of the template
because you will need to insert it into your own
Main Index template in the same
place.
18. Go back to your MT page that lists your
templates (logging in again if you need to - see Steps 3,
4, and 5 above).
19. Click on your Main Index
template.
20. Find the location in your template where you
need to paste the line you copied in Step 17. When you find
it, copy the line in.
21. Click on the SAVE button and
Rebuild your indexes.
Validation
Now that you have everything installed, you may
want to check to make sure it
validates. Now, I have no idea if there are other feed
validators out there nor if this one is the best. All I can
say is it is the one I used.
In any case, you need to type in the full URL to
your atom.xml page. For example, http://www.foo.com/mt/atom.xml
That last part where you include the atom.xml page is
important if you want to validate your Atom feed.
Otherwise, the validator will probably, by default, check
for your regular RSS feed instead even though it's supposed
to automatically find the atom.xml file based on the line
you copied into your Main Index.
In my case, it came up with one error:
line 20, column 23:url must be full URL (15
occurrences)[help]
Clicking on the help link took me to a page that
said I needed to have the http:// part on
my URL. In order to do this, I had to do the
following:
22. Login into my MT site.
23. Click on EDIT YOUR
PROFILE.
24. Find the Website URL
(optional) input box.
25. Type in http:// to the
already there http://www.seto.org
26. I rebuilt all pages, although I'm not sure I
needed to.
27. Done.
I don’t know if adding the Atom feed is helpful to people
since, as far as I know, it’s not something that is generally
supported by many, if any, aggregator programs. Indeed, many
people don’t even know what this is all about in the first
place (
here is a short tutorial on RSS that also lists where to get
some of the better known aggregators). But if you do, and
are using MT, then you could be the first on your block to be
Atom 0.3 compliant.
Aloha!
