The incredible shrinking feeds

The list of my posts related to blog feeds, below, is generated automatically. It updates itself whenever I add another blog post to the "feeds" category.

Q: How did I do that?

A: I used a feed.

But there has been a change.

Feeds are a part of the Internet. Blogger uses them for following and for its subscribe-by-email gadget, though savvy users can bypass that and use a feed reader to get the latest from your blog.

Just to be clear: the above list will update itself whenever I publish a blog post under the "feed" label.

It's a really useful and powerful way to make indexes and tables of contents.

Today: a new low

Your full blog feed includes every post you've ever published. But Google has been curtailing its feeds, first by paginating them and then by shortening the size of the "pages."

Today, the most you can see at a single go (in your feed) is 150 posts at a time. It's a new low, down from the 500 you used to be able to view.

That's what's changed.

150 post works fine for subscriptions, but it vastly complicates indexes and tables of contents such as my list of feeds posts, if they exceed that magic 150.

150 post works fine for subscriptions, but it vastly complicates indexes and tables of contents such as my list of feeds posts, if they exceed that magic 150.

It's as though Google assumes that blogs only post ephemeral content.

Were that true, if every blog post went out of date after publication, there would be no need for an index or table of contents. My list of posts about feeds would be useless, if all the posts were out of date (and, some of them are).

But some blogs (not this one especially) post content that is ever green. Indexes are helpful to readers searching for older contents.

To use all of the feed in such cases, you may need to hack the feed url.

Hacking your feed

To recap, here's how that works.

To begin with, the default feed display is only the most recent 25 blog posts. You can crash though that barrier, however, by adding the max-results parameter to the feed:

http://too-clever-by-half.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?max-results=150

Blogger's 150-post size limit is not so easy to work around. Specifying a max-results number greater than 150 will not fetch more than 150 posts.

Here's what to do if your blog has more than that.

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=150&start-index=151

The start-index=151 parameter (after the ampersand, which you must include) says to start the 150 count at post no. 151. If you have 159 posts in your blog, this will yield the oldest 9 of them.

Note the max-results=150 parameter is still needed to override the other default limit of 25 posts.

150 is the new normal

I've said all of this before (with different numbers). What's new is that we are now down to only 150 posts in a feed.

If you are using start-index based on increments larger than 150, you should adjust that down. Otherwise you may end up skipping some of the items in your feed.

Bonus link

• How to use feeds to make automated lists of posts by topic.