While running too many plugins can slow down your blog. I think you’ll find this one extremely useful and I doubt that it uses very many resources.

http://1cat.biz/wordpress-full-text-feed-plugin-training-video/

Yet another plugin isn’t necessary unless it offers some additional functionality. Remember each plugin you add can slow down the responsiveness of your server, and can possibly break with new versions of WordPress or even a new theme.

The option is set from within your default WordPress Admin area… under Options / Reading… in the Syndication Feeds section, you can set whether you show the full text or summary of your posts in your feeds. You can also set the number of posts your show in your feeds… and on a busy site, 10 is NOT enough!

Barry… with a one-person site that publishes only one or two posts daily, the full text feed is the way to go. Considering that’s what you were doing, would explain the loss in subscribers when you changed to the magazine theme. It wasn’t what they were used to, so you ruffled some feathers.

However on a multi-author site which publishes multiple posts every day, the summary feed could make it easier for your readers to scan through all the posts.

While RSS now stands for “Really Simple Syndication”… originally the acronym was for “Rich Site Summary” and “RDF Site Summary” – the emphasis on the word “summary”

Cheers
Stephen Spry

There is a great little plug-in called Full Text Feed.

http://cavemonkey50.com/code/full-feed/

This is what I use on all my blogs to display a full-text feed.

Barry O.

As always thanks for the insightful comments. You make some great points. I think the real deciding factor is what works best for your readers and gets you the most desirable results. The only way to know for sure is by doing some testing with your readers.

I can tell you this. My feed changed from full-text to excerpt for about 2 weeks after I installed this new template. During that time I lost quite a few subscribers. Of course, there’s no way to know for sure why but, since I’ve made my RSS feed full-text again I have seen a noticeable increase in activity.

I agree with you about scrolling down a long blog page. That’s one of the things I love about some of these new magazine style templates like the one I’m using on 1Cat.biz.

Barry O.

I’m currently using excerpts in my feed but I would like to use full text.

The thing is I can’t figure out how to do this!!

I was on Feedburner and I didn’t see an option for this.

Maybe someone could point me in the right direction.

I’d like to offer some good reasons in favour of using the summary technique to produce your RSS feed… although I DO recognise there are good very reasons to use the full feed at times.

1. a summary prevents (or at least reduces) the chance that your content gets stolen and used on other sites without permission (e.g. that’s why the major article sites only provide summaries)

2. as much as I like reading your blog I won’t find every post interesting, so a summary allows people like me (scanners) to quickly determine which post I should devote more of my precious time to.

3. when a site gets a lot busier, with more than just one or two posts every other day, a summary of the posts allows your readers to keep up to date without being overloaded with information.

if you DO use the full post, make sure all the links and images etc in it use absolute URLs or you’ll quickly find things don’t work as you intend.

It’s a similar argument when deciding whether your blog’s home page should contain ALL the text from the last 10 posts (usually the default for most WordPress blogs and themes) or are you only going to show a summary of your posts to help people scan through to see what you offer and what interests them…

I almost detest scrolling through screen after screen of info to see if there’s something that interests me… I suppose part of the “problem” is that many themes don’t clearly show an obvious visual transition between posts to make it easier for me…

There’s a neat trick to use the “Optional Excerpt” field that’s at the bottom of your WordPress add new post screen… Use that to write a different intro to your item, and then in your index.php template code, instead of using the_content to show the whole post, use the_excerpt to show the “excerpt” field. It’s much better than just letting WordPress decide where to “trim” the intro.

And if you use this field, it is that excerpt that is shown in your summary RSS feed as well.

So it gives you an opportunity to work hard on your writing skills, because if your excerpt doesn’t do it’s job at attracting attention, you ARE sunk!

If you click through to my site, and then scroll down a little past the first (full) post, you’ll see the_excerpt in action.

Cheers
Stephen Spry