Feeds in blogger

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Creating a feed.
  3. Using an existing feed.
    1. Adding entries
    2. Duplicate entries/ Updating entries:

Introduction

The feed is a feature you can use to generate RSS/Atom feed for your blog. With this you’ll be able to:

To use, let’s start by setting the feed file in config. 

$ blogger config -b <blogname> feed_file path/to/feed/file

Of course, the file does not have to exist. If you want the feed file to be out of your blog folder, you need to provide an absolute path. Other paths will simply be interpreted relative to blog_dir. 

#1. This resolves to blog_dir/blog/feed.xml
$ blogger config -b <blogname> feed_file blog/feed.xml

#2. This resolves to ~/.my_files/feed.xml
$ blogger config -b <blogname> feed_file ~/.my_files/feed.xml

Similarly, you can also set ‘site_url’ config now with your website name which helps to resolve the absolute link of your post.

Creating a feed.

If you don’t have a feed for your blog, you can create one using: 

#1. creates atom feed by default
$ blogger addfeed -b <blogname> --setup

#2. To create rss feed
$ blogger addfeed -b <blogname> --setup -rss

You’ll be prompted to set the feed file path if you haven’t already. A set of questions will be asked to set up your feed.

Using an existing feed.

Whether you created feed file with blogger or had existing feed file, you should be able to add entries to it. The type of feed file will be automatically determined. Entries will be appended to it as you add your posts to it. However, note that the indentation of the whole file will change to two-space indentation.

Adding entries

A normal entry consists of:

You have to provide a file argument to ‘addfeed’ command which SHOULD be inside your blog and MUST have “.html” extension. The ‘link’ is then automatically interpreted. However, you have to provide –title/-t and –content/-c option. You can omit –content option if you want. Blogger has -i/–interactive command as well if you want to set title and content in your default editor. 

$ blogger addfeed -b <blogname> file/path --title MYPOST --content HI
$ blogger addfeed -b <blogname> file/path --title "Only Title"

Now, if the file was converted by blogger(version >=1.2) then blogger can automatically fill title and content too as metadata ‘title’, ‘content’(if any) are cached after conversion. This file is in ‘~/.config/blogger_cli/ /meta.json’ file. To control what goes to content see content options

Of course, you can always override those cached titles and content bypassing the –title and --content option to ‘addfeed’ command. 

$ blogger addfeed -b <blogname> file/path

Duplicate entries/ Updating entries:

In a feed, ‘blogger’ identifies entries by their links. When it encounters a duplicate entry in ‘addfeed’ command then it simply deletes the old and updates it with the current one. ‘blogger’ however, keeps the id’s(‘id’ in atom and ‘guid’ in RSS feeds) of feed entries unchanged.

Content options

You can control what summary is extracted and cached for markdown and ipynb file. As of now, summary extraction is not available for Html file however manual entries are supported.

You can control the maximum number of charectars to include from md and ipynb post. Similarly, for ipynb, you can specify nth markdown cell (where n is an integer).

To specify you need to set ‘md_summary_limit’ and ‘ipynb_summary_limit’ config keys. The value is number. 1000 characters are the default for md files. 

$ blogger config -b <blogname> md_summary_limit 100
$ blogger config -b <blogname> ipynb_summary_limit 200

In ipynb files, the character limit applies from 2nd md cell. The first md cell is assumed to be the title and left out from the summary.

Similarly to set cell no in ipynb you can use c[1,2,3] eg: c1, c2 to select 1st and 2nd markdown cell’s text respectively. The default value is c2 for every ipynb file. 

# Selects second markdown cell in notebook
$ blogger config -b <blogname> ipynb_summary_limit c2