Content Syndication with RSS

Producing RSS 2.0 with Blogging Tools

RSS 2.0 is still too young for any dedicated programmatic tools to have appeared, so the vast majority of 2.0 feeds are produced by weblogging tools that use templates. The most popular of these is Movable Type, written by Ben and Mena Trott, which is freely available for for noncommercial use at http://www.movabletype.org. In order to discuss a few important implementation points, we will now look at a template for Movable Type, shown in Example 8-3, that produces an RSS 2.0 feed.

Example 8-3. A Movable Type template for producing RSS 2.0

<?xml version="1.0"?> <rss version="2.0"> <channel> <title><$MTBlogName$></title> <link><$MTBlogURL$></link> <description><$MTBlogDescription$></description> <language>en-gb</language> <copyright>All content Public Domain</copyright> <managingEditor>[e-mail]</managingEditor> <webMaster>[e-mail]</webMaster> <docs>http://backend.userland.com/rss</docs> <category domain="http://www.dmoz.org">Reference/Libraries/Library_and_Information_Science/ Technical_Services/Cataloguing/Metadata/RDF/Applications/RSS/</category> <generator>Movable Type/2.5</generator> <lastBuildDate><$MTDate format="%a, %d %b %Y %I:%M:00 GMT"$></lastBuildDate> <ttl>60</ttl> <MTEntries lastn="15"> <item> <title><$MTEntryTitle encode_html="1"$></title> <description><$MTEntryExcerpt encode_html="1"$></description> <link><$MTEntryLink$></link> <comments><$MTEntryLink$></comments> <author><$MTEntryAuthorEmail$></author> ...