One quirk of WordPress (starting at version 2.1) is the interaction between the ‘more’ tag and the RSS feed. Even if you choose ‘Full Text’ under Syndication Feeds | Reading Options and then use the ‘more’ tag, your post gets cut off after the tag. There are no options to disable this ‘feature’.
Why is this a problem? Social sites such Technorati and myFeedz index your site via the RSS feed. Your site will only get indexed partially and tags appearing after the ‘more’ tag will be missed. Yahoo! also uses RSS feed for indexing - although as an option. If you use Feedburners Email Subscription Service, your readers only get part of your post.
A WordPress plugin called CompleteRSS solves the problem nicely. CompleteRSS forces WordPress 2.1 to display the full article content in your feeds. In addition, it displays your feeds entirely free of the heavily-abused ‘content:encoded’ tags.
A few caveats…
In the WordPress Admin Dashboard, under Options | Reading, the selected feed setting is ‘Summary’ and cannot be changed. This is intentional, and is required for CompleteRSS to work.
The author mentioned a control panel and some options in v1.0. However, as yet there are no options. Actually, you don’t need any options. Just install and activate the plugin. Then, you are off to happier subscribers and better indexing! See the feed for this site as an example.
Update (June 16th): The plugin author’s site has errors preventing you from downloading the plugin. Until the site is repair, I have put a copy here.
Update (June 18th): The author’s site is now repaired. See his comment below.
Addendum: I noticed that one of my blogs still on WordPress v1.52 had the same problem with truncated feed. I installed the CompleteRSS plugin and now it’s displaying full feed the way it should. No problems!
Tags: Technorati, myFeedz
5 comments ↓
[…] you’re not comfortable making changes to your WordPress installation, there are a few plugins that are supposed to do the same thing. I’ve never used them, but try them out and […]
FeedBurner is also a nice solution.
Marcus:
Feedburner is a redirect service and has nothing to do with whether your blog puts out a full or partial feed.
[…] Full text in the feed in not my preference. It discourages feed readers from visiting your site and encourages splogging. Do we have a choice? Not until someone comes out with a plugin to put the tags in the post excerpt. […]
Hi,
Thanks for the article, and sorry about the downtime. We had a MySQL error earlier on and it seems we forgot to restore the programs database (which is, quite ironically, the most important one!) - but it’s back up now.