There is an ongoing debate as to whether you should offer your blog’s RSS feed as a full feed (meaning that the entire post is available in the RSS feed) or as a summary feed (meaning that RSS readers get only an excerpt). There are obviously advantages and disadvantages to either strategy, so it can be difficult to decide which type of RSS feed you should provide to your blog’s readers. Full feed or summary?
Well, it turns out that you don’t have to make the choice. You can offer BOTH options thanks to a WordPress plug-in called DualFeeds. The DualFeeds WordPress plug-in was created by Stephen Cronin, a self-proclaimed expert in “web development using PHP, MySQL, CSS, Javascript, Ajax & about blogging via WordPress.”
The DualFeeds plug-in works for all feeds, including category, tag, author, and comment, as well as the main site feed. Included as part of the plug-in is a sidebar widget that allows readers to select between the full post feed, the summary feed, and the comments feed. There are also options to include links to any of the feeds after each post. And yes, it is fully compatible with Feedburner, redirecting any of the three feeds to the appropriae FeedBurner URL. It can also work in conjunction with FeedSmith.
Why choose between full feed RSS and a summary feed when you can leave that choice up to the people who will actually be subscribing to your site in the first place? With DualFeeds, your readers can choose for themselves.
Matt
December 12, 2007 5:16 pm
I think Feed Readers should allow you to choose between being shown full or partial feeds, for individual feeds…
MyBlogContest
December 12, 2007 6:35 pm
This wordpress plug-in sounds good.
hts
December 13, 2007 10:59 am
it’s a good thing to let the visitor choose what kind of feed to receive, partial or full, so this plugin come in handy. But, as a general rule of thumb, it is a sign of respect to deliver full content in rss, methinks. Why otherwise would your readers subscribed in first place, if not to read your posts through they news aggregator ?
Stephen Cronin
December 19, 2007 1:38 am
Thanks for writing about the plugin, but I better point out that I’m not really an ‘expert’ on the above mentioned topics. I have decent knowledge of them and that’s what I’m supposed to be writing about (although it’s turned out that I mostly write about blogging and WordPress), but expert is stretching it a little! :)
Anyway, thanks for writing up the plugin – I hope it turns out to be useful to people. Personally, I’m full post feed kind of guy…
blogadmin
December 19, 2007 10:28 am
I like full post feed too.
Have you ever though of doing a post to RSS only plugin?
Matt
December 19, 2007 5:16 pm
I’ve been meaning to do that. :P
Stephen Cronin
December 19, 2007 5:39 pm
Post to RSS only? You mean so that you can write a post that will apear in the feed, but not on the blog? I’m sure it could be done… But why?
blogadmin
December 19, 2007 6:13 pm
Yup that’s what I mean.
There are lots of bloggers that run contests to improve their RSS numbers.
A plugin that would post to rss only would allow you to run those contests w/o it being on your blog.
Stephen Cronin
December 20, 2007 12:37 am
I see what you mean. It could be tricky to add a full post to the feed, but keep it hidden from the site. It’s certainly possible to add text / links / images to the feed (I already have another plugin that adds this to the top of a feed), but a full post would be more difficult.
Having said that, I have a vague recollection of a plugin that hides posts in a certain category. If that exists, it could probably be modified fairly easily.
Anyway, interesting idea. I’m a little tied up at the moment, or I’d look into it further. Matt, if you want it, it’s all yours! If Matt (or anyone) doesn’t create it, and you still want it, I may be able to look into it next year.