Feed URL for New Blogger

Previously, with the old classic Blogger account, getting your feed URL is easy. You just sign into Dashboard, select the relevant blog, click SETTINGS tab, then SITE FEED sub-tab, and you will see the feed URL for the blog. It will generally be of the form:

http://yourblog.blogspot.com/atom.xml

Actually, you don't even have to do that. All you have to do is to type atom.xml to the end of the URL of your blog.

However, now with the New Blogger, you do that, and you will just be given a drop-down menu to select whether you want your feed to be FULL or SHORT, and a box for you to type the feed item footer if you wish. There is no indication of what the feed URL for the blog should be.

Amazon Products on RSS Feed

Someone on the Google Blogger Help group has always given this:

http://yourblog.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/summary
http://yourblog.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss

(replace "yourblog" with the actual part of your blog URL in the feed URL for the New Blogger. However, I have typed in other URL like

http://blogger-tricks.blogspot.com/atom.xml
http://blogger-tricks.blogspot.com/rss.xml

into the address bar of a browser and got some result, a mixture of HTML tags and text. In fact, if I use the Internet Explorer, I can read the feed in formatted form.

To settle the matter, I decided to make some tests. This is where having more than 1 browser comes in handy. I have 4 - Internet Explorer, FireFox (favourite), Opera and Flock. I opened all 4 browsers, and signed into Google Reader with 4 different Google account simultaneously. I then tried subscribing to the following blogs in the 4 different Google Reader for 3 different blogs:

Computer and Internet Articles (New Blogger account and template, feed set to full)

Blogger Tips and Tricks (New Blogger account and template, feed set to short)

Blogger for Dummies (New Blogger account, old classic template, feed set to short)

Natural Remedies (if I remember correctly, at the time of test, the blog was using the old classic template. It is now using the New Blogger template)

I then tested subscribing to the feed using 4 different URL's

http://foodasmedicine.blogspot.com/atom.xml
http://foodasmedicine.blogspot.com/rss.xml
http://foodasmedicine.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/summary
http://foodasmedicine.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss

and so forth.

Result of the tests:

For the blog where the feed was set to full, the full articles was displayed in full by the reader for all three, except for
http://foodasmedicine.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/summary
in which case, the feed was displayed as a summary.

For blogs (old classic template or New Blogger templates) where the feed is set to short, the reader displayed the posts in summarised form, except for

http://foodasmedicine.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss

in which case only the title, author and date was displayed. This is because I used
Flock browser for the feed reader. To make sure it is not due to the browser, I tried using other browsers for other blogs with short feed like

http://foodasmedicine.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss

and got the same result - only the post title, author and date was displayed in the reader.

I used the Google Reader for all the tests above. I checked to see if I get the same result using other online feed reader and signed up for Bloglines (Newsgator took too long to load). I subscribed to

http://blogger-tricks.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss

and got the same result - only the post titles, the author and the dates were displayed in the reader. With the original

http://blogger-tricks.blogspot.com/atom.xml

I got the post titles and a summary of the post.

Conclusion. All four feed URL works, but for blogs with feed set to short, it is better not to use

http://yourblog.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss

as all you will get will be only the post titles, the author and the dates.

(actually, things don't seem to be consistent, so perhaps the best is to use the feed URL obtained by the method in How to get the feed URL for New Blogger)

A comment from Miska which I feel readers should read and is additional information which I feel can belong to the post:

"My experience has been that the old url doesn't update correctly. I have my blogs fed into my yahoo and they weren't updating but maybe once a week when I was posting everday so I switched to the new rss one and they update on time now...don't know if it is a mixture of the reader and the url or not but that is what happened for me in My Yahoo."

Posted with Mishka's permission.