Tuesday, February 8, 2011

Blog-page length

Write a post, and it will show up at the top of your blog page. Keep writing posts, and eventually your posts will spill over into archive pages, with links to older posts at the break.

Two things determine where that break is--and you only control one of them.

First, you can limit the number of posts per page using the Show At Most setting at Settings > Posts and comments.

Second, Blogger limits the size of your blog page based on kilobytes of data served. The limit seems to be around 500 kb, counting every blog element, such as photos, slide shows, and sidebar bling.

Blogger always allows at least one post per page. Otherwise if your page exceeds the limit Blogger will bump posts to archived pages so that only the most recent 500 kb are left.

As you can tell by phrases like "Blogger limits" and "Blogger will bump," this is not something that you can opt out of or override.

Both of these limits--the setting that you control and the 500-kb limit that you don't, are ceilings. Both apply, which means your limit or Blogger's, whichever is smaller.

You can't override Blogger's limit with Show At Most, except to make pages shorter.

Blogger calls this auto pagenation, though many disgruntled bloggers had a few other choice words for it when introduced in early 2010.

At the time Blogger touted the benefits to blog authors of optimizing load times, but the policy also conserves use of Blogger's servers, which was surely a consideration.

Update: Although you can't turn auto pagenation off, you can manage it.

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