How to add label-specific feeds to Blogger

A couple of months ago I wrote an article explaining how to add a auto-generated page based on a label to the Blogger standard widget. It proved fairly popular: it’s the most commented post my blog until now, tied with an older one about Google Reader’s “Send To” feature. I complained back then that I didn’t found a way to add the label-specific feed to the page, making it even more like a stand-alone mini-blog. In the mean time I gained more experience with Blogger’s template system and so discovered a way to add these extra feeds.

As most of the advanced tweaks, this will require manually editing the blog template, so it’s probably a good idea to back the original up first. Afterwards head on to the ‘Design’ section in the Blogger dashboard, switch to the ‘Edit HTML’ tab and check ‘Expand widget templates’. Here search for the following line, which is responsible for generating the standard feeds (RSS, atom and comments) on the blog:

<b:include data='feedLinks' name='feedLinksBody'/>

Right after this line and before the next </div> closing tag add this code and save the template:

<b:if cond='data:blog.searchLabel'>
<link expr:href='data:blog.homepageUrl + &quot;feeds/posts/default/-/&quot; + data:blog.searchLabel' expr:title='data:blog.title + &quot; - &quot; + data:blog.searchLabel' rel='alternate' type='application/atom+xml'/>
</b:if>

It basically checks if the current page is a “label search page” and, if that returns true, adds a new link pointing to the label-specific feed. Since the code uses data tags to detect the blog title, address and labels it can be used virtually on any Blogger blog without changes.

The new feed will function just like the built-in options; for example it will be detected by browsers and displayed in their standard feed interface along with the full site feed, as you can see in this screenshot taken in Firefox 4.

With some small changes it should also be possible to replace the default feeds with the label-specific feed, although I don’t think it’s such a good idea to take that choice away from readers. You will probably end up with a fragmented and hard to track audience: if you are using FeedBurner for statistics, it will not track subscribers and hits on these label feeds.