When your blog journey is cut short

Update: This report is largely obsolete. Online stuff changes from time to time, and for this topic a revision would be impractical.

Read more about archived posts, if you like.

When I converted my feed from Short to Jump Break, I hit an unexpected wall involving the blog-journey hack that lets you show your content in chronological order.

I've vaulted over the wall since (and you can too, if necessary), but here is the story.

When I ran the feed of my pipe run through the script host at Feed2js.org, I discovered that the blog-journey it made stopped short a year and a half in.

Apparently there is a hidden size limit built into the blog-journey hack. Size as in kilobytes of data served, not number of posts or anything to do with the dates of the posts.

It might be different for another blog, but for mine the greater number of photos in my Jump-Break feed versus my Short feed bumped into this limit, which seems to be around 500 kb. Anything over that is left off.

Note that a Full feed would hit the limit even sooner.

This limit seems to be built into the javascript host I recommend, feed2js.org. I assume this arbitrary limit was introduced to keep the servers from being swamped, based on the theory that no one could possibly need or want more than 500 kb of feed. (Have I got news for them!)

The limit does not come from the pipes I've set up for this hack. Nor is it built into Blogger, which does not bat an eye if multiple blog-journey scripts are put on a single static blog page.

And therein lies the solution: multiple scripts, segmented by date.

Feed2js is not the only such service on the web, but the others I have tried do not handle formatting as well. Please post a comment or an email if you find a better option.

I truly regret this hidden limit, but am pleased to provide a simple workaround. (Which is up and running on the blog-journey page of my other blog.)