When viewing feeds in an RSS reader, I see that some feeds fetch the full article and some fetch only a snippet.
Can anyone explain how that is done?
It depends on what the feed publishes.
If the feed is excerpts that’s all anyone can get from the feed.
If the feed is full content, you can get the full content.
There is debate over which is best and I guess it depends on the target audience and what you care about.
If you don’t want your content to appear on other places (eg. splogs) then you could try excerpts.
If you think one way or the other might benefit your readership or traffic, try that.
How is it done? Well, in WordPress anyway, there’s a setting for Full Content or Excerpts, easy as that once you know where it is.
Off Topic:
eva bevo convert2media bevomedia scam
I don’t use a CMS, so I would update the xml file myself if I choose to provide a feed. Not sure yet.
So what does that Wordpress setting change in the xml file? I have looked at an RSS tutorial but it mentioned nothing that looked like it might affect how the feed is handled and/or the content that gets picked up.
What on earth is your off-topic part about?
Hmmm, you hand code all the pages? Sounds like a lot of work.
WordPress creates RSS feeds “on the fly” when they are requested. It pulls content from the database, puts it together, and serves it as the feed.
If the setting is for excerpt, it only uses the beginning text and omits the remainder.
If you are hand coding your pages you could hand code the feed file as well, but again, sounds like a lot of work.
Off Topic:
the OT is a special peerfly project of mine not pertaining to this thread
Hmmm, you hand code all the pages? Sounds like a lot of work.
That depends on what you consider to be hand coding all pages, but no, it is not much work at all. A lot of it is templated or included and I will have the forthcoming article content (which won’t occur very frequently) loaded to other pages (e.g. snippets and links) by simple xml.
I suppose that it might be a problem if web design is what you are doing all day long.
I did try the one and only CMS that I could find that does not need a database, but I did not like it and I could not work out how to use it. The instructions were incomplete and badly written. So I stayed with doing things my way.
If the setting is for excerpt, it only uses the beginning text and omits the remainder.
Into which xml tag does this content get placed? Is it in the description or some other tag?
Yes, I guess “description” isn’t the best name for a tag that holds “content”, but that’s the one. If you have more than plain text in it be sure to use
<description>
<![CDATA[ non-parsed-data ]]>
</description>
OK. Thanks, Mittineague.