Save Your Wordpress Feed, Two Fantastic Plugins

It was bad enough that I have found it difficult to update this blog recently, but when I discovered that I was only giving out a partial feed I felt even worse that I couldn’t fix it. There is plenty of debate over whether feeds are better as full or partial, but I can’t stand only reading part of an article in my feed reader then having to visit the site. I subscribe to a feed so that I don’t have to visit a site, save for commenting. Still, this is a long running issue and my opinion lies on the side that full feeds are king.

Given that my own site was violating my own beliefs, I had to fix it. Since I upgraded to Wordpress 2.1 and found out that this is now intended behaviour when using the <!–more–> quicktag, though is also subject to a debate. Thankfully Ronald Heft came to the rescue and has released Full Text Feed, a plugin that exports the full article, whether you use the quicktag or not. This is now in action, so if you check my feed, you should now find the whole article available (can I take this opportunity to suggest subscribing too? I’ll be writing loads of great stuff soon!)

Not Satisfied!

Since I was upgrading the Wordpress version, changing the design and fixing the feed problem, I decided not to stop there. Now at the bottom of each feed article you should find a bit more information about the post, including copyright, links to tag on del.icio.us, search on Technorati and how many comments there are so far. I like all of this as it makes interaction with the site easier, giving more information as well as making it easier to react. This is thanks to Ozh and his Better Feed plugin. It is highly customisable and allows you to put a footer on your posts including all the stuff I mentioned above. Ironically, one of it’s features contradicts the two paragraphs above this one by allowing a ‘Read more’ link in your feed, but I turned that off pretty swiftly so as to avoid confusion.

All in all, my feed is now what I want it to be, full and loaded with extras so that you out there will read it. My thanks go to the plugin writers, let’s just hope it works!

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