Alan Levine has a post on his blog that describes how he is publishing updates on Feed2JS using MovableType. If you haven’t heard about Feed2JS, I suggest you go check it out – it is one of the coolest little tools around. Basically, it is a set of PHP scripts which allow anyone to include an RSS feed on their web page by generating a Javascript code that gets the feed info from the Feed2JS cache and munges it into some HTML that gets written into the web page. There are even some styles to choose from to make it look a little bit dressed up. The best part is that Alan has released the PHP scripts so that you can host the service on your own server instead of using Alan’s server.
Now what Alan has done is to publish an RSS feed to descibe updates to Feed2JS. The cool little trick he used was using MovableType to generate a main page which includes updates, a history page for older updates, and the RSS feed. Any further updates can be blogged, and they will instantly show up on the main page. Even better, they will also show up in any feed aggregator. I’ve already added it to mine!
I always appreciate when someone can take an existing tool and work with it in a novel way. Alan summed up his work as follows:
If you can grasp what blog software can publish, if you can wrestle and mostly master the templates, then you can exploit it to do all kinds of web publishing tasks- not your average blog.