Breaking the 512k RSS Feed Limit

When feeds get large (> 512kb), the FeedBlitz RSS service intelligently truncates your feed so that your subscribers keep getting updates, as opposed to simply not serving your feed at all, which is what happens with you-know-who.

Today we've spruced up the feature so that, if FeedBlitz truncates your feed, we'll add an extra "virtual post" to the end which shows the titles of all the entries that didn't make the cut. This kicks in automatically once your FeedBlitz feed grows to be over 512k.

Controlling Feed Size

We've also introduced the ability in your RSS settings for you to manually force this to happen after a given article count. Say you have a long feed for whatever reason, but you want to limit what subscribers see to just the top 10 articles. Now you can - the limit is selected at RSS / Settings (by default it's all articles). Like the size restriction, if you enable it FeedBlitz creates a summary post for articles that didn't make the cut.

Custom Feed Sizes

What, though, if you want to take your feed and split into a "new" posts section and an "old" posts section without the virtual summary bogging down the end?

Can do!

FeedBlitz has a new URL parameter "limit" which dynamically controls how many posts are presented. It works like this:

• http://feeds.feedblitz.com/feedblitz is the whole feed, no matter what.
• http://feeds.feedblitz.com/feedblitz/limit/10 shows the most recent 10 posts.
• http://feeds.feedblitz.com/feedblitz/limit/11- (note the trailing dash) shows the remaining articles.
• http://feeds.feedblitz.com/feedblitz/limit/16-20 shows posts 16 to 20 only.

You can post these different "limited" feed URLs in your blog's RSS autodiscovery tags to guide visitors to the most appropriate ones. There's no messing around with FeedBlitz config screens, and no summary posts, just the selected articles. The feature works for all FeedBlitz'ed feeds and is available right now.

Browser-Friendly and Mobile-Friendly Feeds Too

FeedBlitz automatically produces browser and mobile-friendly versions of your feeds. All these new options work for all the different versions of your RSS, so (for example) http://m.feedblitz.com/feedblitz/limit/10 shows the top 10 articles only in the mobile-friendly version of the FeedBlitz blog's main RSS feed.