Blogger posts from feed in chronological order

A while ago I did my Chronological post order hack, which simply reverses the order of the posts on the screen using javascript. That can be used to read the whole blog from start to end, like this.

Adam has in his Too Clever By Half blog a different solution that uses 3rd party services to manipulate and reverse the feed to be displayed in chronological order, but there are drawbacks in using (free) third party services.

A while ago the Blogger dynamic views were announced. Dynamic views use javascript and AJAX to read from blog feed, and display the entries.

All these things made me think, if the whole reversing thing could be done in Blogger, reading the feed and manipulating it by javascript, without third party services. And it could, I yesterday figured it out, see a demo here. I'll show you how you can do it. It is actually quite easy (once the code is ready), no template editing, for example.

Create a new page

Create a new page in your blog. Name it as you like. Edit the post as HTML (important!), and paste this code into it:

Data provided by Pastebin.com - Download Raw

There are some configurable values in the script, which should be self explanatory. If you want, for small blogs you can display all entries on the same page (tested with ~200 entries). The maximum number of entries that this script can display is 500, because of limitations in Blogger feeds. The actual amount may be lower, and it depends how many entries are left in your blog's RSS feed and some Google caches (includeHistoricalEntries). You cannot know, before you try. Formatting of the posts' header and footer is very basic, you can make it better if you want, add social buttons, etc.

Save and test. You can see it in action here: Chronological post order from feed demo.

Not everything can be displayed, for example dynamic content that is generated by javascript. This is a limitation of (Blogger) feeds. That is why some code examples (pastebin.com snippets) don't show in the demo. If you need to display javascript content, too, then you'll better use the other chronological post order hack.

Reference: Google Feed API.

Update March 22th: Google loader no longer need API key. Article and code snippets simplified. Thanks to Adam who tipped me about this in comments. :)