You've seen it on a zillon Movable Type- or Radio-powered websites already: "Syndicate this site", it says. Sometimes with an orange button labelled "XML" or "RSS" beside it. Since you've already installed MT, optimized your templates for search engines and publicized your blog, now it's time to look at RSS / RDF:

What is it?
RSS = Rich Site Summary

Not a lot (yet) - but a growing number of savvy "power users" are using so-called news-aggregators to get an overview of the top news-stories online. Providing a "feed" for such users and their tools is easy and may expose your content to more potential readers. Furthermore, as this is a trend likely to become more widely adopted in the future, this will make your site more future-proof, and available to the early adopters.

Setup
Setting up a default RSS feed in Movable Type is easy:

• By default, Movable Type 2.21 creates a "RSS 1.0 Index" file called index.rdf in your primary website folder. Mine is called http://www.jacobsen.no/anders/blog/index.rdf
  
• The default RSS 0.91 file created is mostly there for backwards compatibility, so let's not worry about it for now.
  
• Verify or correct your default RSS 1.0 template to incorporate this bugfix.
  
• Additional information like an image representing your website or similar can be added by following the instructions from kalsey.com (note that those apply to an earlier version of Movable Type (and RSS 0.91), small differences may be present)
  
• Make sure a link to the index.rdf file is present from your front page.
  

Formatting preferences
By default, Movable Type formats the file to contain Headline, Excerpt of the posting, date/time and URL of the permanent link.

• Some people, like website usability guru Mark, prefer providing full articles.
  
• Studies have shown that users may prefer to navigate only headlines with excepts, but not all the full articles when browsing for online content. (Source: rss.benhammersley.com).
  
• I provide only headers and excerpts. Make your own call. If you want to change the default template from excerpts to full text, change the MTEntryExcerpt tag to MTEntryBody.
  

Reading it!
There are loads of ways syndicated content can be parsed or read:

• For a quick and easy first try of how your new, RSS-syndicated blog looks, head to bloghog.com. Sign up (free) and add your blog for instant gratification.
  
• Syndic8.com seems to be a primary resource for serious newsfeeds. You can add your feed easily without registering or logging in. Later, you can dig out all kinds of stats for your blog.
  
• More serious powerusers are probably using one of the following tools (I haven't tried either of them, so no promises made...): AmphetaDesk, Radio Userland, News is Free or more (from Google Directories)
  

Further reading on this topic:

• News and information on the RSS Format
  
• Creating RSS Files for your website
  
• Additions? Corrections? Write a comment!
  

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