Increase Your Recent Posts and Comments to 10 - Blogger Hack

Before you get too excited and try the tricks in this post, I just wanted to let you know beforehand that it might not work anymore. Several visitors have tried and told me it didn’t work so the result might be the same for you. Blogger continues to make changes without announcing them so hacks and tricks expire which makes it frustrating for everyone. If you’re willing to try and increase your recent posts and comments to 10, then continue reading. I apologize in advance if it doesn’t work for you.

By default, Blogger is very limited in comparison to features or plugins available to WordPress blog users. For example, there are free plugins for WordPress that allow you to show your most recent posts, most popular posts, and most recent comments.

Blogger, on the other hand, doesn’t have that functionality but people have figured out a clever way to do it anyhow. If you haven’t already read our How to Setup Your Recent Posts and Recent Comments Blogger Page Elements then you might want to start there first before reading on.

This article will take Blogger users to the next level and allow you to do things like increase the default max posts from 5 to 10 (or whatever size you want), filter by category, or filter by a date range, etc. It’s actually pretty powerful and I’m happy to share my secrets with you.

Monday, January 5, 2009

Multiple Parameter Example

You can combine all these filters into one url and really fine tune your results if you wanted to. Let’s say you want to show your 10 most recent posts filtered by the “book” category (label, tag). Your feed url would look something like this:

http://YOUR-BLOG-NAME-HERE.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/cure/?max-results=10

Another example would be to show 10 most recent posts filtered by a date range:

http://YOUR-BLOG-NAME-HERE.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/?published-min=2008-01-
16T00:00:00&published-max=2008-02-28T23:59:59&max-results=10

Here’s a list of all the query parameters you can change for any Blogger rss feed. I wouldn’t worry about the “alt” one but the rest are pretty useful to know.

  • alt - the type of feed to return, such as atom (the default) or rss.
  • orderby - the order to return entries, such as lastmodified (the default) and starttime.
  • max-results - the maximum number of entries to return.
  • /category - specifies categories (i.e. labels) to filter the feed results. For example, http://www.blogger.com/feeds/blogID/posts/default/-/Fritz/Laurie will return entries labeled with Fritz AND Laurie.
  • updated-min, updated-max - the bounds on entry update dates.
  • published-min, published-max - the bounds on entry publication dates.
  • start-index - 1-based index of the first result to be retrieved (for paging).

Now that you are familiar with all your rss feed url options, you can really customize your Blogger recent posts and comments sections. Many of you have asked me how to increase your feed limit from 5 to 10 so now you can. In some cases I had to completely delete my recent comments widget and install it again for the filters to correctly work. I’m not sure why but you might run into a similar issue.

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