If you look on my main page, and scroll down the sidebar you’ll see a section entitled “C3 News & Events” that has the last 5 entries on our news blog. Sure, it’s a great way to show off the caliber of material I’m very proud we’re covering on the C3 site. A View From Home is my personal playground and I really did it to see how the new Feeds.app lite works in Movable
Type 3.3.

It couldn’t be easier.

First make sure that you CHMOD 755 the index.cgi file at plugins/feeds-app-lite. Then, from the blog’s main admin page (new layout), select “Create a feed widget.” Enter the target RSS feed (or site URL and it will be autodiscovered, if possible).

Then simple options:

After you hit “save” you get the single line of code to stick in your template, or use the Widget manager to add it to an existing Widget. In Movable Type 3.3, Widgets are clumps of code you can link together so you don’t have to go digging in template files. Eventually, I’ll configure my templates to use them but for now I’m comfortable editing the HTML.

If it has an RSS feed (which is pretty much everything these days), you can easily get it on your Movable Type blog without going through the bother of installing the 3rd party plug-in yourself. No more jealousy over all the fun the Typepad folks are having. I’m not sure what’s the difference between the “lite” version of Feeds.app that comes with MT 3.3 and the so-called “pro” version. Anyone?

My only complaint is that since installing beta 3 my administration pages are really slow. Dreamhost was also having some MySQL issues around the same time, so I’m not sure what’s the cause and what’s the symptom here. The site itself seems fine, it’s just when I’m getting around Movable Type administration pages that it’s like going through mud.

P.S. I posted this entry using the new ecto for Windows beta that just came out. Except for the fact that I’ll have to go back and add the tags in the Movable Type interface since I like having them down in the comments section and I can only do that from the browser, it’s pretty good. Seems far more solid than previous betas I’ve tried and light years ahead of Blogjet which seems to be languishing. Once you get used
to WYSIWYG and inline spell checking in your blog editor, it’s hard to accept anything else. ecto delivers that and much more.