Quick Tip: Full RSS Feeds
The Issue
One of the most annoying things in the world for a blog reader is truncated feeds. If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, I envy you.
Imagine this… you see an interesting title in your feed reader, click on it, and the first few sentences have you hooked… and then the article stops, with a big glaring “read more” link. Having hundreds of posts still to read, you open it up in a new tab and continue on to the next post. Then you get distracted, forget about the opened tab and the fact that you never read the post at all. It’s marked as read, but you’ll likely never come back to it.
Another issue is that many people read blogs while at work or school with content-filters. Feed readers are rarely blocked, but gaming sites are more likely to be.
A feed reader is usually very mobile friendly, but the mobile sites of various blogs aren’t always.
I understand that sites want their ad revenue and click-throughs, or to force you to see their pretty theme, but it is a huge deterrent to readers. I know a lot of people who won’t even subscribe to a blog with truncated feeds. Alienating readers is not a good way to garner traffic. The reality is, if someone actually reads your full content they are more likely to want to click-through and participate in discussion.
The Fix
I finally found a solution that I’m really surprised never occurred to me before.
Full Text RSS Feed is a simple site that converts a truncated feed to a full one.
All you need to do is (1) grab the URL of your desired feed (2) paste it into the box and hit submit (3) copy the new link and add it to your feed reader (4) enjoy the satisfaction of having thwarted those that previously made your life more difficult. There are a bunch of other similar utilities out there as well, including this Chrome plugin, but Full Text RSS Feed met my needs the best.
Wow, that’s a great tip! Very useful, and completely contrary to Whiney Post Day.
I decided that since I whine almost every other day, I would be constructive today
If you use Firefox, you can also pick up Better GReader (Temerity_Jane introduced me to it a long time ago) – you can “preview” the post inside the feed reader (assuming you use google reader too I guess).
OMG! Thank you so much for the full feed link. Since I hop around different computers at work, sometimes on Chrome, Firefox, or IE and always with different security levels, I love this so much. As much as I love to see people’s pretty websites (sorry, I don’t give two shits about ads >_>;;;) only the feed reader is consistently available.
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It’s a great point that a lot of bloggers see, but few end up taking to heart. Unless I absolutely love either the author or the content they put out then I don’t bother having them in my feedreader. If I see someone in my feed convert to a truncated feed then I just delete them and don’t bother going back.
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OK, I officially LOVE this. It really breaks up the flow of my reading to have to click through.
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Really?!?! This is amazing! I will be trying this out tonight for sure. I’m one of those
legion readers whose workplace blocks (an oddly random assortment of) gaming sites.
This will be fantastic… and YES to all who say they don’t subscribe to truncated
feeds – I make one or two exceptions, but it’s aggravating and I don’t read them as
thoroughly. THANK YOU for publishing this link!
(Sorry for any formatting weirdness – the comment box is not wrapping my text.)
ETA: But now it’s not bringing the pix through… ?? Tried this on WoW Insider and
while it does bring the full post into the reader (woot!), certain images don’t show –
like the Around Azeroth featured screenshot, which shows up just fine in my normal
feed. /confuzzled
It looks like it doesn’t grab any images that would show up before the break. I know that in WordPress those are “featured images” which are treated in a special way, I imagine WoW Insider’s platform behaves similarly. I don’t really mind that so much though. The developers of the feed site seem to be very active though, so perhaps this will be fixed in the future.
I emailed them link to WOW insider’s feed as well as a few others that had the same issue. I’m hopeful they can get things working 100%!
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[...] from Shades of Kae teaches us how to get Full RSS Feeds from Truncated Feeds. I have converted ALL my truncated feeds using this method, which means I’m actually [...]
I think I love you just a little bit. This is awesomeness squared.
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