I had done a bunch of Googling to discover the "right way" to do this, and I came across many different methods for constructing feeds for creating category-based syndicate feeds. So, after messing around with the different methods, I settled upon doing it this way.

  1. Go to the MovableType menu for your blog.
  2. On the left, click on the "TEMPLATES" button.
  3. On the listing of templates directly underneath where it says "Archive-Related Templates," you'll see a hyperlink for "Create new archive template." Click on that one.
  4. Give your template a name such as "Category RDF" or "Category RSS 2.0."
  5. For the body of the template, I used the following respectively, but Internet searchs provide a bounty of them:
  6. Hit "Save" to create the template.
  7. Now, back on over to the menu buttons on the left, click on "WEBLOG CONFIG."
  8. Up at the top of that page, you'll see a navigational menu looking like " Core Setup | Preferences | Archiving | IP Banning." Click on "Archiving."
  9. Click on the "Add New" button and up pops a window asking you to select an archive type and a template. For archive type, choose "Category"; and for the template, choose the name of the template you just created ("Category RDF" of whatever) and hit "add."
  10. Now, that should do it. But, in terms of placement of the files, I have an "index.xml", "index.rdf", "rss20.xml", and "feed.xml" under each category's subdirectory. So, that is, there's an http://www.alpha-geek.com/perl/index.xml, http://www.alpha-geek.com/perl/index.rdf... and http://www.alpha-geek.com/ocd/index.xml... so on and so forth -- one for each category. To accomplish this, use some of the MT tag-fu.
  11. In the same window under your archiving preferences, you can specify an "Archive File Template." If you leave it blank, MT uses its defaults. You can, also, specify "just_put_it_here.html". Or, using MT tags, you can say "<MTArchiveCategory dirify="1">/index.xml" (You can actually go crazy with that and do a lot of directory-fu.)

This MT stuff is pretty nifty.

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