If you’ve recently installed or upgraded to WordPress 2.1 then you may be unaware of a change to how your feeds are handled.
I recently noticed that my feeds were starting to get cut off at the point where I insert the the <--more--> tag on my posts. For anyone who doesn’t know, the <--more--> tag is used to show a teaser of your posts on your blog front page, with a hyperlink ((more...)), which when followed displays the rest of the post’s content.
After doing some digging I discovered that WordPress 2.1 was to blame, I’m not alone with this problem either. There are several people who have complained about how WordPress 2.1 handles full text feeds.
Prior to WordPress 2.1 my feeds would always show the full post text, even when using teasers on my web site. With the introduction of WordPress 2.1 this is no longer the case. I managed to get round this problem by installing the Full Text Feed plugin from cavemonkey.
There has been quite a lot of debate over full versus partial feeds, but personally I am in favour of full text feeds. I would be interested in your views on this subject. I’m quite happy to show my feeds in either full or partial format based on the comments I get on this. Full or Partial - you decide 
I like full feeds for the following reason. I subscribe to dozens of feeds and I am often too busy to click-through to the main web site to read the post. I like the ability to read the full post in a feed reader and only click-through to a web site if I want to add a comment.
I guess a lot depends on the feed reader you use. I use Newsgator which delivers my feeds in a summary format, this allows me to quickly skim through all new posts. Any posts of interest can be expanded to show the full post in the feed reader without clicking through to the main web site. The following two screenshots demonstrate this.
Here is a post shown in summary view.
If I click on the small cross symbol shown in the screenshot above then it expands inside the feed reader to show the full post.
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4 responses so far ↓
1 AL // Feb 20, 2007 at 6:27 am
Seriously thank you! I’ve been dying to know how to fix this issue!
2 Dean // Feb 20, 2007 at 8:46 am
No problem. Glad to help out.
3 Jeff // Feb 21, 2007 at 9:00 am
I prefer full feeds.
4 Rob // Feb 22, 2007 at 7:59 pm
I subscribe to nearly a hundred feeds. I much prefer partial feeds so I can quickly skim through and find anything interesting.
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