Hello.  Completely new to blogs/blogging (software- and terminology-wise).  I had a discussion board with settings that only I could post a new topic (thoughts of the day, editiorials, etc.) but others could reply.  Have I been blogging all these years and didn't know it?    I stumbled into MovableType by way of reading a Dreamweaver review in Hotwire's Web Monkey and the author had a link to his site.  I liked the layout of his articles and saw the link-back to MT.  Followed it, downloaded, installed (to MySQL backend) and it's a great program.  Very easy to get started and yet another reason for pulling all-nighters (doing cosmetic customizing).

Anyway, to cases.  I love this syndication stuff.  What a boon for connecting sites (people) with common interests.  Did a search here for "syndicate" and with thanks to Morbus in these forums for answers and recommendations to others' questions, I tried RSS Monkey.  Most excellent!  I was syndicating test blogs in no time.

My initial question has to do with MT's "Syndicate this site" feature.  What does the visitor do with that XML code?  Reason I ask is, and assuming I'm understanding this right, MT generates a new index.xml file when I update (save/rebuild) my blogging.  The snip of javascript that RSS Monkey generates and that I put on some test sites points to that index.xml.  That's the code I would give out to those whom I want to syndicate my site.

So what is the code used for that MT generates via "Syndicate this site"?

Next question has to do with generating the code, or rather, creating the index.xml file's contents.  When I looked on my test sites to see the syndicated blogs, it displayed with the clickable name of the MT blog, a blank line, then the clickable title of the blog.  E.g.,

INSOMNIA (this is my MT blog name)

Day One (this is the entry title)
... text of blog ....

Can this be controlled by me so that the MT blog name is not included so that the sydnication on someone else's site displays just my blog entry's title (and subsequent text)?  Thus:

Day One
... text of blog ...

Lastly, the "text of blog" displayed the first 20 words on the syndicated test sites.  Is this controlled by the excerpt parameter?  I recall reading in the docs about that setting and I'm assuming it's the setting that controls how much of the blog text will display in syndication.  Yes?

Well, I've only been using MT for one day, having just set it up, so there's lots to tinker with.  From what I've seen of it thus far, very enjoyable!

Bob