Blog feed for more than 150 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 500 150 posts per feed. Here's how that works, and how to work around it if your blog has more than 500 150 posts.

Update: The limit was 500 post for a long time, but is now a mere 150 posts. The 500-post limit still applies to the comments feed, though!

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

Working around the limit

Fortunately, this limit is also flexible, in a way. All of your posts are in your feed. However, you can only see them in 150-post increments.

For instance, if the first 150 posts of your blog feed are here:

http://YOURBLOG.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?max-results=150

the second 150 posts are here:

http://YOURBLOG.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?max-results=999&start-index=151

The "start-index=151" parameter (after the ampersand, which you must add) says to start the 150 count at post no. 151. If you have 209 posts in your blog, this will yield the oldest 59 of them.

Note the "max-results=999" parameter is still needed to override the other default limit of 25 posts. (Actually, "max-results=150" will work just as well.)

You must treat each 150-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 RSS 2 HTML to create the script for you.)

By the way, there is a similar 150-post segmentation of any label feed. The 500-post limit lives, however, in the comments feed! at least when it uses the blog-ID-based url. 

Using your feed

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.

You may also be interested in a popular script that uses your feed to generate an alphabetized list of posts, each a clickable link. (No coding knowledge required.)

If you are a javascript wizard (I am not) who wants to use the feed or json object, just loop through all the 150-post segments.

In both cases the "start-index=" parameter gives you access to your whole feed, in chunks.