Finding Your Blogger blogId And postIds

Your Blogger blogId is your blog's unique identification number. You could change your blog URL and name but the blogId remains the same. You can find your Blogger blogId at quite a few places. The first is your blog's HTML source. Search for 'blogId' and you'll find something like

blogID=2091151685457159297

The next place to look is your Blogger Dashboard. If you hover the mouse pointer over the 'Manage' links ( i.e. the links for Edit Posts, Settings and Layout (or Template )), in the status bar, you should be able to see the blogId as part of the URL those links point to. Or you could right-click and select Copy Shortcut ( IE ) or Copy Link Location ( Firefox ). If you've followed any of those links, you'll also be able to see the blogId in your browser's address bar.

Finally, you can also see your blogId on the comments link on your posts. It's part of the URL again, so use the same method as for the Dashboard.

All your posts also have a unique id. The postIds are little harder to find. You can get them from the 'Manage Posts' page ( follow the Edit Posts link from your Dashboard). The Edit link for each post has the postId as part of the URL, you can view it in the status bar or by copying the link to a text-editor.

Similarly, the postId can be found as part of links on your posts, the comments link, the Email Post link among others. In almost all cases, it'll be a parameter called postId in the destination URL. One exception is the Subscribe to: Comments ( Atom ) on the individual post pages, where the postId would be the really long number in the URL. For example:

http://tipsandtricks.nogoodatcoding.com/feeds/6725560071480110191/comments/default

Here, 6725560071480110191 is the postId.

Customizing Mininova RSS Feeds

Mininova offers search-based feeds i.e. RSS feeds that can be generated according to some optional parameters.

Mininova has two basic feed URLS; one is the global RSS feed at http://mininova.org/rss.xml. The second is the RSS feed for a search, found at http://mininova.org/rss/search+terms. Incidentally, I'm a big fan of their 'clean' URLs; very easy to use and very intuitive.

Starting with the global feed, parameters that can be passed are:

• cat : The category of the torrent. For example, 'Movies' are category 4.
• sub : The sub-category. For example, 'Action' movies are sub-category 1 while 'Animation' movies are 29. The sub-categories aren't necessarily in sequential order. Sub-category 2 is 'Trance/ House/ Dance' under the 'Music' category.
• user : The user name. For example, 'aXXo'. Case-insensitive, so you could use 'axxo' or 'AXXO'.
• num : The number of results you want returned. The default count is 20 items.
• direct : This is a new addition and doesn't take a value. It replaces the link of the feed item with the actual download URL ( you know, the one you see stating 'Download this torrent!' ) so that when you click on it, the download starts instead of you being taken to the 'General Information' page of the torrent.

You can't really combine these parameters, but if you attempt to

• cat takes precedence over the others
• user is ignored if either cat or sub is used
• direct can be used with any of the others, either as the first parameter ( ?direct ) or at the end ( ?cat=1&direct )

The search feed is much less customizable but you can easily find the button for the feed at the top of the search page, if you're not comfortable fiddling with the URLs.

• Spaces are replaced by +'s
• You can filter a category by simply adding the category number at the end of the URL like http://mininova.org/rss/search+terms/2
• Sub-categories don't seem to work, I was getting weird results with URLs like http://mininova.org/rss/search+terms?sub=35 or http://mininova.org/rss/search+terms?cat=35

Well, that's all there is to it. Have fun. And if you find something else, lemme know!