Whee! Not sure whether to feel like a genius or an idiot ;-) Instead of doing my real work tonight I decided to figure out the whole weblog syndication thing. I honestly think the whole thing used to work but I hadn't checked it in ages and I've done a lot of updates and found out that I had old, invalid syndication feeds. So I went back to the MT forums, because it's not really clear through the MT users manual, and found out here is how it all works...

The syndication feed is just a link to a template in your blog. The older one is the RSS 1.0 index and the newer XML feed is the RSS 0.91 index (which should now be renamed 2.0). Mine were out of date, apparently they don't update themselves when you upload a new version.

To check yours go to the Feed Validator and enter your link (should be your weblog/index.rdf or index.xml). This will pretty much tell you what to do. I got this page telling me how to update my Movable Type templates, which I did and the XML one works but the older one is buggy so I didn't add it to my syndicate link.

And MT 3.+ is supposed to support Atom feeds... hmmm, looked through my templates, nothing for Atom. Nothing in the user manual, but there is an Atom template on the default templates page (and the newest RSS 2.0 one). So I added a template and named it atom.xml and the validator says both now work!

So I think I may finally be a real blogger now :-) So that's my aha moment for today, my sincere apologies to anyone I frustrated with my blogging ignorance... Next lesson - how the hell does trackback work...