Blog feed for more than 500 posts

The folks at Blogger, bless their hearts, erect several obstacles to creative use of your blog's feed.

Some of us use our feeds--our whole feeds, not just the most recent stuff--to make an index of our blogs, or to reverse the order so that it begins with the oldest post.

The default Blogger feeds, however, show only the most recent 25 posts. This is pretty easy to get around: you just append "max-results=999" to the feed url, which overrides the 25-post limit (replacing it with a a larger one). So the feed for this blog, breaking the 25-post barrier, is

http://too-clever-by-half.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?max-results=999

It turns out that Blogger has a second, more-serious limit of 500 posts per feed. Here's how that works, and how to work around it if your blog has more than 500 posts.

This limit has probably been in place for a while. I missed it because it is not documented and also because I do not have more than 500 posts on any of my blogs. (Yet.)

Fortunately, this limit is also flexible, in a way. All of your posts are in your feed. However, you can only see them in 500-post increments.

For instance, if the first 500 posts of your blog feed are here:

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

the second 500 posts are here:

http://YOURBLOG.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?max-results=999&start-index=501

The "start-index=501" parameter (after the ampersand, which you must add) says to start the 500 count at post no. 501. If you have 809 posts in your blog, this will yield the oldest 309 of them.

Note the "max-results=999" parameter is still needed to override the other default limit of 25 posts.

This is a lot like the recent decision of Yahoo Pipes to paginate its feeds, and the remedy is similar.

You must treat each 500-post increment as a separate feed, manipulate each as you see fit, and then paste the scripts for them serially into your blog to create the entire series. (Use a service like feed2js to create the script for you.) You can also merge the feeds at Yahoo Pipes, if that works for you.

By the way, there is a similar 500-post segmentation of any label feed, and a 200-comment segmentation of the comment feed. In both cases the "start-index=" parameter gives you access to your whole feed, in chunks.

This is a nuisance and if it pushes you to say its not worth the trouble I do not blame you. However, with this workaround it is possible to get at your whole feed, if you need it, Blogger's limits notwithstanding.