Too Clever By Half

Update: This report is obsolete.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.