Blogger feed corrector: Yahoo Pipes based hack

UPDATE: You can try this hack now. Yahoo has fixed the date issue. I thank all those who voted on my feedback.

As many of you know, Blogger feeds are ordered by updated date and not published date. This becomes an inconvenience when you edit your old posts because it results in the posts resurrecting in your feed. Recently, Yahoo released an amazing feed manipulation service called Pipes and Aditya came up with a nice idea that we can re-order the Blogger feeds by published date using Pipes. I thought I will build upon that and make it easier for everybody.

This hack is for those who don't use Feedburner and depend on the feed provided by Blogger itself (the links that appear at the bottom of your page as "Subscribe to:"). I have modified Aditya's pipe slightly so that it can work with any feed. By making a small change in your template, you can provide the link to your blog's re-ordered feed instead of Blogger's feed. If you want to try it, first goto the pipe's page and give your blog's feed URL. Check if the pipe re-orders your posts by published date instead of updated date.

If you are convinced about it, here's how to use it in your template. Find this includable in your template.

<b:includable id='feedLinksBody' var='links'>
<div class='feed-links'>
<data:feedLinksMsg/>
<b:loop values='data:links' var='f'>
     <a class='feed-link' expr:href='data:f.url'
  expr:type='data:f.mimeType'
  target='_blank'><data:f.name/> (<data:f.feedType/>)</a>
</b:loop>
</div>
</b:includable>

Replace the line in red with this line.

<a class='feed-link' expr:href='"http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/KEflSli82xGIHxezIBeTaQ/run?feed=" + data:f.url + "&amp;_render=rss"' expr:type='data:f.mimeType' target='_blank'><data:f.name/> (RSS)</a>

If you save the template and check your blog, you will see that 'Subscribe to' link now points to the re-ordered feed. You could write a post asking your current subscribers to resubscribe to your new feed so that any updates to your old posts will not affect them.

Caveats:

1. As the new feed is created by the pipe, the resulting feed's title will be the name of the pipe which is "Blogger feed corrector". In your post, you could ask your subscribers to rename the feed in their feed readers. Or you could clone my pipe and rename the pipe itself.
2. Yahoo only provides the piped feed in RSS and JSON formats (Naturally, they are not a big fan of Atom format because Google is behind it). So, the re-ordered feed is only available in RSS format. This is not a problem because almost all feed readers work with RSS.

If you try this and find any other caveats, let me know.