Rodent Regatta

I have all three types of feeds. None of them will provide you with a complete entry, if I use Movable Type’s extended entry feature. I cannot figure out why.

A hearty thank you goes to Marie Carnes for her help. The fact is the feature/script on my weblog that allows anyone to see entries from the same day last year and in prior years pointed me to Marie. When I wrote about my RSS travails this morning, she commented again.

This time, I’m not going to let a year go by without solving this problem. When I figure it out, I’ll solve it for all three syndication feeds. While I’m at it, I hope to be able to add the ”author field” to the feeds.

It’s a nuisance to maintain three different news feeds!

This entry is nothing more than a test of my RSS 2.0 feed. What I’m attempting to do is modify the feed to make certain that full entries are passed to your news reader.

I use a script that allows me to display a portion of an entry on my home page. At the end of a long entry is a link that says, ”read more.” If I put text into the Extended Entry field of Movable Type’s text entry boxes, the script kicks in. You’ll see it next:

This is now the extended part of the entry. Up until this test, the RSS feed did not show this portion of an entry. I’ve made a change and I hope it will now provide the complete entry.

Once I’ve tested this, I’m going to move to the Atom feed and make certain it is providing full entries. Be patient. Once this is resolved, I’ll get back to other topics.

• * * UPDATE * * * It did NOT work. It will take more time to figure out why or what to do to make it work. In the meantime if you get flakey results from my feed, please let me know.

• * * UPDATE 2 * * * The Atom feed does not pick up the full entry either. Anything I put in the ”extended entry” field of Movable Type is not passed with my RSS or my Atom feed. Some savvy user may be able to point me in the right direction.

• * * UPDATE 3 * * * Scriptygodddess is the author of the script I use. She also uses the same script. I’ve just checked the RSS feed I get from her. It shows the extended or complete entry. That tells me that what I want to do can be done. I’ve simply got to find which line(s) in the RSS feed and the Atom feed need to be changed. Then, there’s always the index.rdf file which may need to be changed as well. Why am I having to modify three files to allow people to read my site in a news reader?

Good information for anyone contemplating or running a Macintosh is continuing to build up in the comments at Photo Matt.

Meryl has provided an update on Firefox after spending some time with it and Mozilla. I’m continuing to see the same flaws that I mentioned earlier.

No, it wasn’t me; at least not yet. It’s coming though. Take a look at Matthew Mullenweg’s purchase and the tips and comments he received after posting about it.

Here’s a list of recent Mac-related entries that I’m using to make a purchasing decision as well as to define a migration and learning curve:

• Mac purchase at Photo Matt with comments
• Brad Choate’s software list
• My own entry about The Switch (with comments)
• A thread at the Textpattern Support Forum
• Sean Bonner’s answers in the comments to this entry and his Apple weblog