One last note in this recent learning process: I found that my own blog’s RSS feed was not what I wanted it to be. At first, it would only display a short snippet, 40 words, with no formatting and no photos. By going into the Movable Type web interface, I found that under “Weblog Config,” if you clicked on “Preferences,” you could set the “number of words that should appear in an auto-generated excerpt.” I changed it to 400, and that allowed bigger excerpts, but it still allowed no line breaks, and no photos.

Kristen McQuillin to the rescue. I noted that her blog displayed quite nicely in NetNewsWire Lite, so I asked in the Japan Blogger’s Ring mailing list for help, and she responded immediately. What is needed is for the Movable Type RSS templates to be updated via the MT web page interface. She pointed to this site for instructions and links to the correct scripts, and this site to validate it. She also pointed me to this page on MT’s web site, which has a variety of updated templates for MT. Thanks, Kristen.

The question remains, will a complete and formatted RSS Feed work out? Even after a very short while, I have noted a big jump in bandwidth traffic on my site, and am fairly sure it is not due to more visitors–the increased RSS feed might be increasing the traffic in terms of KB downloaded, though maybe not visitors to the site. I am still way under my monthly traffic limit with my web host, but I will have to keep an eye out as time goes on as to how the increased RSS Feed affects things.