Brajeshwar

Flash-MX reported yesterday about the new Movable Type 3.1. Many of the features are cool enough that will surely will make many of current Movable Type users upgrade to the new version. I am particularly impressed with the sub-category idea, post scheduling and many other features.
Very recently, there was a discussion about posting off-topic but on your personal blog. Most of the blogs aggregated by Fullasagoog, MXNA etcetera talks more about particular Softwares and talking about personal informations are term off-topics and we wish not to include them as much as possible. Also of not mixing other technologies which then becomes more or less off-topic, for instance, if I keep blogging about web development and css, the term that this blog is a Flash blog will not be that valid. So, what about categorizing and making good use of the same, emitting your RSS feeds categorized into categories. We can thus ask Fullasagoog, MXNA, etcetera to aggregate only the categories that you want into the proper channel, Flash, Cold Fusion, Dreamweaver and other technologies.

How to categorize your RSS Feed:
For Movable Type, here are the steps to categorize your RSS feeds according to the categories that you have.

1. In your Movable Type Menu, go to the Templates Menu and select either the RSS 1.0 or the RSS 2.0 template (I prefered the RSS 2.0) for editing. Select and copy the code in the Template Body window.

2. Go back to List Templates and select “Create New Archive Template”.
Give the template a name such as Category RSS.
Paste the code from your RSS template into the Template Body window, and select SAVE.

3. Go to Blog Configuration > Archiving and select ADD NEW.
Choose Archive Type “Category” Template “Category RSS“.
Select ADD. There are slight differences between MT 2.x and 3.x but the idea is the same. So you may like to watch out.

4. For the new template you’ve just added, set up an Archive File Template with this code:
<MTArchiveCategory dirify=”1″>.xml

SAVE your changes.

5. Rebuild your Category Archives.
MT will generate an XML file for each category in your archives folder.

6. You can list these feeds on your site using the following code:
<MTCategories> <a href=”<MTBlogArchiveURL> <MTCategoryLabel dirify=”1″>.xml”> <MTCategoryLabel> </a> <br />
</MTCategories>

Update:
Well with the release of 3.1 update to Movable Type, David Raynes’s Sub-Category Plug-in have been included with the release. Personal thanks to David Raynes for helping me out with some issues personally by braving my irritaing questions through AIM.

Follow the same step as above, the only thing you have to take care is to change the xml file a bit. The changes are

(a) MTCategoryDescription instead of MTBlogDescription in the categorydescription node.
(b) MTEntriesWithSubCategories instead of MTEntries

The lastn is your choice, change it if you wish to feed more number of entries per category.