Let Your RSS Subscribers Choose: Full Text or Summary?

WordPress automatically sets up two feeds for you: your posts feed and your comments feed. You have a choice on the posts feed to publish the full text of your post, or a summary. Which do you choose?

Some of your readers may prefer full text feeds, while others prefer a summary. So which group do you defer to? Publishing a summary feed forces people to click through to your site to read the entire post, which of course, helps your traffic stats, but might irk some of your readers. Conversely, publishing the full text of your post in the feed is one of the ways content scrapers get hold of your stuff. (Though, you can use FeedEntryHeader, a plugin that adds a copyright notice to the top of your feed to help deter the scrapers.)

Why not allow your subscribers to choose whether they want a full or summary feed? Now you can offer both formats by using the DualFeeds plugin.

DualFeeds works with ALL the feeds at your site, not just posts and comments. If you’ve set up feeds for categories, tags, authors, etc., DualFeeds will handle them, too. There’s a sidebar widget with links to Full Post, Summary and Comments feeds and the option to add links to Full Post, Summary & Comments feeds after each post. Feed requests for each of the three feeds can be redirected to the appropriate FeedBurner URL (use it with or instead of FeedSmith.) Note: The ?Full text? option must be selected in Settings -> Reading.

Give your feed subscribers the benefit of a choice between full or summary posts – they’ll be happier and you just might get more of them!

If you enjoyed this post, be sure to subscribe to the feed in your feed reader or via email.

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4. 13 Plugins Make My WordPress World Go ‘Round
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