public virtual MemoryStream: Creating categorized RSS feeds using Movable Type

Friday, March 7, 2003 12:36 AM

Creating categorized RSS feeds using Movable Type

I love Movable Type's customization features. I just used this to auto-generate RSS feeds per category, and link to these feeds from the main page. I previously had one custom RSS template for javablogs.com, but this is a much better solution.

How did I do it?

Go to your RSS template and copy its contents to the clipboard.
Go back to the templates page and click "create new archive template".
Give it some meaningful name and paste the RSS template into the template body.
Now go to "weblog config | archiving" and press "add new".
Select an archive type of category and pick your new template.
Set the name of the archive to rss_<$MTArchiveCategory dirify="1"$>.xml or something similar.
~~Now in your main index template, find the MTArchiveList tag, and add a link to rss_<$MTArchiveTitle dirify="1"$>.xml inside it.~~
et voilà - you've got RSS feeds per category!

UPDATE: I forgot that the default template does not have an archive-list. So don't do anything to the existing MTArchiveList tag in your main template, but instead add this block somewhere in there:

<div class="sidetitle">
Categories
</div>
<div class="side">
<MTArchiveList archive_type="Category">
<a href="rss_<$MTArchiveTitle dirify="1"$>.xml">[xml]</a>
<a href="cat_<$MTArchiveTitle dirify="1"$>.html"><MTArchiveTitle></a><br />
</MTArchiveList>
</div>

oh and my regular category archive is setup as cat_<$MTArchiveCategory dirify="1"$>.html in "weblog config | archiving".

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Comments

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Trackback from mattberther.com at April 10, 2003 4:15 AM

hi luke,

first of all thanks for you clear discription, but i am getting the wrong url to a generated xml and html files.
the program saves it into my blog directory and not in archives one. any ideas?
thanks
max

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