Recent Posts Widget - Feedburner Hack

I have tried a number of different third party widgets to provide Recent Posts lists on my blogger blog. I was, till recently, using blogger's own feed widget and parsing its internal feed for my blog this was http://impartialism.blog.com/feeds/posts/default (change "impartialism" to your own blogspot prefix).

If you have not done this, this is the quickest way to get Recent Posts on your blogger blog:

1. Go to your page layout.
2. Select the Feed widget
3. Input the appropriate feed URL as noted above.
4. Customize (e.g add dates and amount of items)
5. Save Widget settings
   
6. Move widget to appropriate place on your blog

However there are two problems with this:

• You can only show a maximum of 5 items
• You cannot control how often the feed refreshed in google's internal cache, meaning the latest post(s) are not often shown for quite a few hours.

If you are using feedburner here is a trick and no HTML mods of your page is required!

1. Go to the Publicize Tab
2. Select BuzzBoost
3. Select the number of items ot display (I chose 10)
4. Select "Same Window"
5. Untick all lower options (you can play wiht this yourself later)
6. Save/Activate
7. Select "Blogger" in the "Use as a widget" drop down menu
8. Press Go
9. Then do your usual widget moving/previewing/saving etc.

That is it. You can also change the display settings from this BuzzBoost page without needing to re-add the widget!. I found the formatting a bit off regarding dates and summaries - the blank lines were annoying - but that depends partly on your template, it is possibly worse with my 3 column solution.

Anyway you can see the result on the right. Timely post updates and more than 5 items!