Too Clever By Half

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: 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.

The quirky but useful Pipes web service has added a new kink, with implications for bloggers that use it to reverse the order of their posts.

Running your blog feed though the pipe I built will flip the order, and until recently you could then just port the pipe's feed to feed2js to show your blog in the order you want.

Frustratingly, Yahoo Pipes has started to paginate its feeds in blocks of 100 posts. So the feed url you get from Pipes only displays the first 100 posts in the series. To see the next 100 posts, you have to add the following to the feed url:

&page=2

You then run both feed urls, separately, through feed2js, and mash the results together so they look like a continuous feed.

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.

Alan Levine, originator and keeper of the useful but endangered feed2js.org web service, announced last week that thanks to

the generosity of people who have donated financial support, and one anonymous donor in particular, I have sufficient funds to keep Feed2JS running at least through June 2013, and maybe longer.

Feed2js turns rss feeds into scripts that will run on blogger.

Your blog can be a journey rather than a most-recent-first news site.

You can show your blog content in chronological order, instead of reverse-order default, using a method that relies on external web services to flip the posts around.

These services are web sites that let you manipulate data, in this case having to do with your blog's feed. The services are free and rely on the kindness of strangers.

Web services make my blog-journey hack a little daunting (though people have told me it's easier than it sounds). This approach requires bloggers to think of their content in new ways, and to learn how to use these third-party web services a little bit.

Besides that difficulty, however, there is another pitfall.

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.

As I write this there is an unexpected emergency note at the bottom of every feed script that runs though feed2js.org:

Attn web site owners: Please support Feed2JS!

This note, with this link, appears unwanted on every blog and web site that uses this service. Here's what's happening and how to make the message go away.

Update: This report is 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.

The justly popular Feedburner service comes with a 500-kb limit. Exceed that and Feedburner will not syndicate all your content, dropping the oldest first.

This is consistent with the model of a feed as a broadcast of your posts to subscribers (via feed reader or email). Such readers presumably are only interested in your latest and greatest.

However, complete feeds that comprise all of your content are broadly useful for other purposes, such as my Blog Journey hack to show posts in chronological order, oldest first.

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.

I woke up on Tuesday to find that my blog-journey hack was broken, but the problem is fixed now.

Nested away in your blog settings is a control panel for blog posts.

I don't mean the screen for editing individual posts, of which you surely know already. This lets you change the uniform way all of your posts are rendered in your blog.

At stake are things like whether and where to show the date, labels, even title of posts.

Blogger's layout page, at Layout, is the powerful graphical-interface control panel for your blog.

There you can add gadgets and even rearrange them just by clicking and dragging.

Perhaps you know that you can also configure those gadgets by clicking their respective "edit" links. But look over at the rectangle labeled "Blog Posts." That's right, you can configure them too.

In the beginning was the blog, composed of posts.

But there are many other pages and parts of your blog, some added later by Blogger (such as static pages), others generated automatically (such as label searches).

It's handy to know what you can do with these. Here's a field guide.

Photo: Mike

Update: the improved Page List widget, sometimes called "Pages," has become generally better than the old Link List for the purpose of creating a horizontal navigation widget of links.

Most blogs should have such a widget in the horizontal area between the header and the posts. (This blog has one.) As I said below in 2011,

Navigation gizmos like this can connect readers to your content, making your blog more useful, fun, and, ultimately, popular.

This is your blog, on a diet.

Blogger automatically pagenates your blog pages based on size. Exceed 500 kb, and Blogger continues your blog onto an archive page.

This feature (or bug if you prefer) is not going away. You can't disable it, but you can manage it.

Write a post, and it will show up at the top of your blog page. Keep writing posts, and eventually your posts will spill over into archive pages, with links to older posts at the break.

Two things determine where that break is--and you only control one of them.

Bloggers with administrative privileges can limit the number of posts per page at Settings > Posts and comments > Show at most.

This setting lets you control the size of dynamic pages.

Sort of.

Different blog pages display different content, but the design of your blog is constant throughout.

So it is that your readers, as they click through your blog, get many visual cues that they have not left your blog even as the content changes. Header, sidebar, gadgets, footer, color scheme, and typeface do not change.

This is valuable to you and your readers, and something that Blogger ensures without any work required on your part.

Library of Congress

The horizontal region in your blog's footer, after the end of your posts, is sub-prime real estate.

Gadgets you place here do not compete for your readers' attention but will only be seen by those who make it to the bottom of the page.

If your left or right sidebar region is longer than the length of the posts shown, there will be a blank gap between the posts and the footer-area gadgets.

Gadgets anywhere add to load time and subtract from the available page-size quota.

My own rule of thumb is that any gadget so unimportant as to belong down here is not worth including at all.

Some exceptions could apply.

Your call.

« Gadgets over posts

Index

Appendices »

Image: mariaisabela

Be especially discriminating about what gadgets you put in the horizontal region below your title and tagline and above your blog posts.

After your title, this is the first thing your readers will see.

Every time they visit.

Photo: Irina Bevza (CC BY 2.0)

Most blog themes include a column on the left or right hand side where you, the blog author, can put photos, text, links, and many automated blog gadgets. Some have sidebars on both sides.

Gadgets are sometimes called widgets. They can be dragged to horizontal positions at the top of the blog (just under, but not in, the title-and-tagline block), and the bottom of the blog (in the footer of every page).

For modern blog themes, the sidebar collapses into a small menu when viewed on phones and, sometimes, tablets.

Your sidebar, and the gadgets you add, appear on every page of your blog.

Photo: Gotanero (CC BY-SA 3.0)

They introduce and frame your blog. New readers read or skip your blog because of them.

Are you getting full value out of your title and tagline?

Photo: Marten Newhall

Searching your blog for a word or a phrase in Blogger's navbar (or from Blogger's sidebar search gadget) generates a dynamic page of those posts that include the search phrase.

The results of this search take the familiar form of all of Blogger's dynamic pages: posts, spilling automatically into archived pages if needed.

Unlike other dynamic pages, however, the default order is "by relevance," as determined by some undocumented algorithm. There is a link to sort the posts into the familiar reverse chronology.

« Static pages

Index

Header, title & tagline »

In the beginning was the blog, made of posts.

Archive and label-search pages helped readers to find the posts they liked.

In late 2009, in response to popular demand, Blogger added static pages: Blog pages that do not comprise any posts at all.

Typical uses include an "about this blog" page, or an extended profile of the blog author, or an index of blog content.

Photo: Mike

In the begining the blog page comprised blog posts. It was good, but we needed more.

Labels, and their related search pages, provide one of the most useful and powerful features of Blogger blogs: the ability to characterize posts, and to group like posts together on a separate page.

This is something you can't do using Blogger's static pages feature.