Syndicating “Best of Show”

I’ve took a little twist on RSS to deploy it in another fashion here at CDB. This was partly to response to a post by James Farmer as he tried to find an alternative approach to blogrolling.

Maybe not understanding Radio as much as I should, I commented that it might be feasible to create his own RSS feed his blog could subscribe to. Not being able to clearly explain it in text, I decided to code an example on my blog.

Here is what I did- on my right side “links” i have a section called “Best of Show” where L list the title and link to my recent presentations. Until now, what I did was to edit my template every time there was a new one (and there were four this month).

I thought I could just create my own RSS feed for this content, display say the 5 most recent on the front page, and display them all on an individual page.

Now I can update both by editing my RSS feed. Simplifies my life! Here is what it took to pull this off in MovableType and the MT-RSS Feed plugin:

First I had to set up a feed, using the Webreference tool described in Writing RSS 1-2-3. You can find this feed at:

http://cogdogblog.com/alan/show.rss

Where I used a format of:
Title contains both the presentation title and the date in parentheses.
Link URL for the online version of the show
Description – the abstract.

On my front page, I use this code:



&lt;MTRSSFeed file="http://cogdogblog.com/alan/show.rss"&gt;

  &lt;MTRSSFeedItems lastn="5"&gt;

&amp;raquo; &lt;a href="&lt;$MTRSSFeedItemLink$&gt;"&gt;&lt;$MTRSSFeedItemTitle$&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;

  &lt;/MTRSSFeedItems&gt;

/MTRSSFeed&gt;



&lt;div align="center"&gt;&lt;a href="show.html"&gt;&lt;em&gt;all best of show&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/div&gt;

which gives me the titles and links for the 5 most recent items on the front page of the blog, along with a link to the page with the full list.

On my Full listing page template (create a new index template in MovableType that saves as “show.html”), my template uses:



&lt;MTRSSFeed file="http://cogdogblog.com/alan/show.rss"&gt;



&lt;h2 class="date"&gt;&lt;$MTRSSFeedTitle$&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;



  &lt;MTRSSFeedItems&gt;

  

  &lt;div class="blogbody"&gt;  

  &lt;h3 class="title"&gt;&lt;$MTRSSFeedItemTitle$&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;

  &lt;p&gt;&lt;$MTRSSFeedItemDescription$&gt;&lt;br /&gt;

  

  &lt;span class="posted"&gt;&lt;a href="&lt;$MTRSSFeedItemLink$&gt;"&gt;&lt;$MTRSSFeedItemLink$&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

  &lt;/div&gt;

  

  &lt;/MTRSSFeedItems&gt;

&lt;/MTRSSFeed&gt;