Les Jones: I Need RSS Advice

August 12, 2004

Blogging > I Need RSS Advice

So I started playing around with RSS integraters. I loaded up LesJones.com and realized it wasn't very readable via RSS. One of the entries looked like this:

1. Eliminate all farm subsidies, tariffs, quotas and price supports. 2. Tell Western Europe it is paying for its own defense from now on. There are 10 more....

Luckily it was a short post, and the link got included, but this was the exception for a lot of my posts. I bumped the summary size from 40 characters to 150 characters for now. A lot of my posts include blockquotes from other sites. I'm going to try to push those to the bottom when possible, and include the link at the top of the post for the convenience of RSS readers. I'm learning.

I noticed that InstaPundit's summaries are huge. I can usually read his stuff without visiting his site. I figured that would make his page size huge, but I checked his source and found out he's using linked RDF files. That's probably a better way to go eventually.

Any other tips? I'm especially interested in tips on writing style and how many characters most bloggers use for their summaries.

Posted by lesjones

Comments

I have a two RSS feeds on my site, one a short version and a complete entry version. I do this because I like to get the whole thing from a blog if at all possible.

Your RSS feed doesn't seem to include any of the HTML meaning you don't get line/paragraph breaks, which makes it hard to read in a news reader. I'm not sure what blog software you are using, but it was pretty easy to get mine to start including encoded HTML.

Posted by: Ron at August 12, 2004

Ron: I noticed the no-HTML thing. I'm using MovableType. Looking throught the Config screen I didn't see any obvious way to enable HTML summaries.

Help!

Posted by: Les Jones at August 12, 2004

Looks like you will need to change the RSS 1.0 template.

According to the docs it looks like you need to add the encode_html to your $MTEntryExcerpt tag in the part of the template.

I don't know what your template actually looks like, but looking at the default from the MoveableType website you need to find the line that looks like this:

{description}{$MTBlogDescription encode_xml="1"$}{/description}

and change it to this:

{description}{$MTBlogDescription encode_html="1"$}{/description}

replace the {}with less than greater than characters. Comments remove actual tags.

No guarantees on this as I know nothing about moveable type.

Posted by: Ron at August 13, 2004

I Googled and found this page and this advice: replace this

{description}{$MTEntryExcerpt encode_html="1"$}{/description}

with this:

{description}{$MTEntryBody encode_xml="1" remove_html="0" $}{/description}

(Like Ron, I'm using {} instead of angle brackets to bypass the comment HTML filter.)

That gets the entire post in the index.rdf file, rather than just the excerpt. It's supposed to include the HTML, but no go. Still working on it.

Posted by: Les Jones at August 14, 2004

Comments on the old blog are closed.