Getting your feed

My blog-journey hack is based on manipulating and formatting a blog feed.

There's a lot you could know about feeds, and I'm no expert. Here's a primer and some resources sufficient for hack purposes.

A feed takes your blog content and squirts it over the internet to feed subscribers.

The subscribers may view the feed in many different ways that should not concern you. As a blogger, you only need to decide (1) whether to allow feeds of your blog at all and (2) if so, how much of your content to include in the feed.

The settings for your blog feed are at Settings > Site Feed and you can chose from "None," "Short," "Until Jump Break," and "Full." Short will truncate each post in your feed at about the 250th character, which is useful if you write good lede paragraphs. "Until Jump Break" lets you decide where to truncate each feed posts.

If your goal is to reproduce every word of every post in your blog in chronological order, you need to pick "Full." You can change this setting at any time.

There are other advantages and disadvantages to each. More about this choice here.

Blogger has this handy help page about feeds.

Once you've enabled your feed you can view it at its own url as follows. (Substitute your blog name from your blog url for "YOURBLOGNAMEHERE.")

http://YOURBLOGNAMEHERE.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?max-results=999

This is the url that you will send through Yahoo Pipes.

Update: If you burn your feed at Feedburner (or elsewhere), read this.