Maximum display posts on RSS?

I never needed to play a lot with RSS, but now I have a project to do, and I wonder if it is possible to pull an RSS feed of all the posts for a certain blog...

I'm not talking about creating a feed generator. I'm just curious why most of the blogspot.com etc websites have available only the last 5 or last 20 p开发者_Go百科osts, but never the complete list... is it a performance/security reason? I guess it is the user's right to decide how many posts go in the feed, right?

How many entries you want to have in your RSS-Feed depends on the goals you want to achieve with the RSS-Feed. Usually you want to provide information about the current articles on your site. That's why you usually have only the most recent articles in the feed.

Performance is of course an issue. A popular RSS-Feed with many followers does not want to send a huge XML file all the time. That can be addressed with enough ressources, but as long as it does not really help your goal, why do it?

I do not see a real security issue. If someone wants to steal your content, he can simple iteratate over the articles on your website directly. RSS would make it a little easier, but if someone wants to steal the content, he will steal it anyway, with or without a full RSS feed. If you take Denial of Service into consideration - we are back at performance issues - there might be a threat to availability. But that's already quite speculative.