As always, this information is provided as is, without any warranty of any kind (inset disclaimer here). You use this at your own risk. YMMV.
If you are using Movable 2.64 and recently upgraded to 2.65, you may know that there is a new template available. The template is for the Atom syndication format feed. Note that if you did a clean install of 2.65, you can probably skip this entire post as I assume everything is configured for you. But, if like me, you did an upgrade install and want to enable the Atom feed, you may want to read on.
In general, there are two things you need to do to enable the Atom feed. The first is to get the template from MT. The second is to edit your Main Index to include an "auto discovery" link to the feed.
The Atom Template
1. Go to the MT site and look for and click on the the link to the Atom Index.
2. Highlight and copy all of the text, making sure to scroll down to the bottom of the window.
3. If you aren't already, login to your MT installation.
4. Click on Manage Weblog.
5. Under Manage, click on TEMPLATES.
6. Find and click on the link to Create new index template.
7. Under Template Name type in Atom Index (I'm not sure what the full installation official name is so if anyone knows what it is, feel free to leave a comment below. Although, you could just as well use Atom 0.3 Index instead.).
8. Under Output File type in atom.xml
9. Leave "Rebuild this template automatically when rebuilding index templates" checked.
10. Leave "Link this template to a file" blank.
11. In the Template Body input box, paste all of the text you copied from the MT site default Atom index in Step 2.
12. Click on the SAVE button but do not rebuild the files yet.
13. If you aren't there already, click on TEMPLATES to get the listing of your default templates.
14. Check to make sure Atom Index is now listed as one of your templates with atom.xml shown as the Output File.
Main Index Template
15. Go back to the MT site, default templates page, Main Index by clicking on the link here.
16. Look for the following line: <link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="Atom" href="&@60;$MTBlogURL$>atom.xml" />
17. Highlight and copy that line. Note where this line is in relation to the other lines of the template because you will need to insert it into your own Main Index template in the same place.
18. Go back to your MT page that lists your templates (logging in again if you need to - see Steps 3, 4, and 5 above).
19. Click on your Main Index template.
20. Find the location in your template where you need to paste the line you copied in Step 17. When you find it, copy the line in.
21. Click on the SAVE button and Rebuild your indexes.
Validation
Now that you have everything installed, you may want to check to make sure it validates. Now, I have no idea if there are other feed validators out there nor if this one is the best. All I can say is it is the one I used.
In any case, you need to type in the full URL to your atom.xml page. For example, www.foo.com/mt/atom.xml That last part where you include the atom.xml page is important if you want to validate your Atom feed. Otherwise, the validator will probably, by default, check for your regular RSS feed instead even though it's supposed to automatically find the atom.xml file based on the line you copied into your Main Index.
In my case, it came up with one error: line 20, column 23:url must be full URL (15 occurrences)[help]
Clicking on the help link took me to a page that said I needed to have the http:// part on my URL. In order to do this, I had to do the following:
22. Login into my MT site.
23. Click on EDIT YOUR PROFILE.
24. Find the Website URL (optional) input box.
25. Type in http:// to the already there www.seto.org
26. I rebuilt all pages, although I'm not sure I needed to.
27. Done.
I don't know if adding the Atom feed is helpful to people since, as far as I know, it's not something that is generally supported by many, if any, aggregator programs. Indeed, many people don't even know what this is all about in the first place ( here is a short tutorial on RSS that also lists where to get some of the better known aggregators). But if you do, and are using MT, then you could be the first on your block to be Atom 0.3 compliant.
Aloha!
