Getting The Most Out Of Your RSS Reader: Full Posts Instead Of Summaries

Keeping up with all of your favorite blogs and news sites can be time-consuming. There are new blogs with amazing content popping up every day and it can get very hard to keep track of them all. Most people subscribe to the RSS feeds of their favorite sites so they can read them all in an RSS feed reader like Google Reader. This works great for the most part except some sites don’t offer up the entire posts in their feeds.

Why would someone do such a thing?

Sites usually display summaries in their feeds in hopes that you will click-through to their website. They do this to increase their page views, get more ad impressions, increase time on site, etc. So there are actually some pretty good reasons to do this.

My problem with it is I do most of my reading on the T on my way to work. The train I ride every morning spends a third of its time above ground and the rest under the streets of Boston where my phone loses service. So it doesn’t matter how compelling or awesome your summary is, I can’t click-through to your website because I physically can’t.

How to fix the problem

There are a few ways to go about it however the easiest by far is Full Text RSS Feed Builder. It basically takes a feed and replaces summaries with full posts.

Unfortunately, not all websites are created equal. How you go about abstracting full text from one site can be different on other sites. That’s where a slightly more powerful tool called Yahoo Pipes can help. With Yahoo Pipes there’s a bit of a learning curve but you ultimately have more control over the final product. To help, here is a list of Pipes that can help get you started creating feeds sans their summaries.

If you are using Google Reader in chrome you can download Super Full Feeds for Google Reader to enable full contents feeds.

So now you never have to leave your RSS reader. Next time we’ll look at how you can create optimized, more targeted feeds to get better more relevant content in your RSS reader.

Image by dayvidday