Feeds for Labels in Beta Blogger

With all the buzz over the new features in the Blogger in Beta, one thing I wondered from the start was whether there would be a feed provided for the new 'Labels'. I had kept my eyes and ears peeled for any mention of it, but haven't seen it talked about anywhere. Then yesterday I noticed a post from Pete on the Blogger Data API with a passing reference to label filtered feeds.

- [beta] rel="alternate" link for label-filtered feeds now includes the label

from 9/7 Blogger API fixes

Hmm. Label filtered feeds. Sounds like a plan. But what's the format? I haven't seen it mentioned anywhere else, so like a typical male I spend the next 30 mins trying every combination of feed name I could think of, in every CaSe. Nothing. So when all other options are exhausted, then I read the documentation. (Again, typical male eh Zo?) Which led me to this page Google Data APIs Protocol. And from there we dig down until we finally see the key.

We decided to specify a slightly unusual format for category queries. Instead of a query like the following:

http://example.com/jo?category=Fritz&category=2006

we use:

http://example.com/jo/-/Fritz/2006

This approach identifies a resource without using query parameters, and it produces cleaner URIs. We chose this approach for categories because we think that category queries will be the most common queries.

So that appears to be the key. A hyphen. So here's the format for a 'label' feed on beta.
http://beta.blogger.com/feeds/YOURBLOGID/posts/TYPE/-/LABEL
So the feed to my label feed for beta is
http://beta.blogger.com/feeds/20460175/posts/summary/-/Beta
Of course the YOURBLOGID should be your blog's id number, TYPE can be either full or summary, and LABEL is the name of the actual label you want. Also from the GDATA docs it brings up the option of including more than one category (label) in the feed. And it seems to work as expected now in beta also. So if you wanted only posts that match BOTH label 'a' and label 'b' it seems to be allowed to format it as
http://beta.blogger.com/feeds/YOURBLOGID/posts/TYPE/-/A/B

The GDATA docs also suggest that you should even be able to pass query string to the feeds, but that hasn't worked for me as of yet. Maybe I'm doing it incorrectly, or it's functionality will be added later.

For the time being I've added a simple javascript at the top of my Label Results page that points to that label's feed. I'm not sure what all else people can do with it, but it's another way to get at the data in your blog that should provide some interesting combinations.

Beta Blogger | Feeds | ATOM | Labels | Categories | Phydeaux3