Tip: Understanding the Atom/RSS feeds created by Blogger

If you've heard of RSS feeds, you probably know that they're a way for your site's fans to keep up to date with your site by "subscribing" to your feeds. If they have a feed reader, any time you publish a new post, they'll see it in their reader's dashboard. You might also know that you can use those feeds to automate publishing to 3rd party services such as Facebook (using RSS Graffiti), transform your feed using Feedburner, and lots of other neat functionality. But you can also turn around and integrate those feeds back into your site, creating cool slideshows, custom sections of content, and much more (for an example check out Pinch Gallery's featured section on their homepage and their news section in the left).

But before we go into creating cool functionalities for your blog it's best to understand the types of feeds that Blogger provides for you.


Full site feed:

Atom 1.0: http://YOURBLOG.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default
RSS 2.0: http://YOURBLOG.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss

Comments-only feed:

Atom 1.0: http://YOURBLOG.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/default
RSS 2.0: http://YOURBLOG.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/default?alt=rss

Label-specific site feed:

Atom 1.0: http://YOURBLOG.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/label1
RSS 2.0: http://YOURBLOG.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/label1?alt=rss

Posts having ALL of the labels specified feed:

Atom 1.0: http://YOURBLOG.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/label1/label2/etc
RSS 2.0: http://YOURBLOG.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/label1/label2/etc?alt=rss

Individual post comment feed:

Atom 1.0: http://YOURBLOG.blogspot.com/feeds/postId/comments/default
RSS 2.0: http://YOURBLOG.blogspot.com/feeds/postId/comments/default?alt=rss

Note: You can find the postId of an individual post from the Posting | Edit Posts tab. Simply mouseover the 'Edit' link next to a particular post, and that postId will be displayed in your browser's status bar.


Blogger does not provide the ability to

• find all posts having either label 1 or label 2 (disjunction), or
• find all posts having label 1 but not label 2 (negation)

In future posts we'll be discussing ways to use these feeds within your page to create all sorts of effects... stay tuned!