Incorporating your latest Marks into a Movable Type weblog

This tutorial explains how to display an RSS feed of your most recent Marks in a weblog powered by Movable Type.

Before you begin

In addition to having a Blogmarks.net account and a Movable Type weblog, the only prerequisite is to have the RSS Feed plugin installed for Movable Type.

To install the RSS Feed plugin, do the following:

1. Download the latest version of the plugin from the Six Apart Pro Net plugin directory.
2. Follow the installation instructions contained in the mt-rssfeed.html file that comes with the plugin package.
   

Note: If you are using a MySQL database, you have to configure the $RSSFEED_DATA_DIR variable in the mt-rssfeed.pl file.

1. Find the commented out line :

      $RSSFEED_DATA_DIR = "./db/";
   

2. Replace ./db/ with a path to the directory where you wish to store the data for your RSS feed (this path must end with a /), eg :

      my $RSSFEED_DATA_DIR = "../httpdocs/weblog/db/"; 
   

Getting the RSS feed of your latest Blogmarks

Blogmarks.net provides feeds for your Marks in two formats: RSS 1.0 and Atom. For the purposes of this tutorial, we are interested in the RSS 1.0 feed.

The RSS 1.0 feed of your latest Marks is found at http://api.blogmarks.net/rss/user/USERNAME , where USERNAME is – you guessed it – your Blogmarks.net user name.

Editing your Movable Type templates

You are now ready to edit your Movable Type index template.

1. Add the following code to your index template, or wherever else you want your Marks to be displayed.

    <MTRSSFeed file="[RSS1.0feed]">
    <MTRSSFeedItems lastn="10">
    <p>- <a href="<$MTRSSFeedItemLink$>"><$MTRSSFeedItemTitle$></a><br />
    <MTRSSFeedItemDescriptionExists> <$MTRSSFeedItemDescription$></MTRSSFeedItemDescriptionExists><br /></p>
    </MTRSSFeedItems>
    </MTRSSFeed>
   

2. Replace [RSS1.0feed] with the correct URL for your Blogmarks.net feed, eg http://api.blogmarks.net/rss/user/smudie
3. Save your template and rebuild it to apply your changes.

Known issues

You need to rebuild your Movable Type templates manually whenever you add a new Mark if you want the list on your weblog to remain current.

Sources

Much of the information contained in this tutorial is taken from a post at movableblog.com that provides similar instructions for displaying del.icio.us tags in an MT blog.

The author

This tutorial was written by Stuart Mudie, a Paris-based technical and marketing communications writer.