Hey, just a quick note to apologize if I’ve flooded your RSS feed reader with older posts that pretended to be new today. I was trying to set my feeds to show the entire story instead of the short excerpt they currently display in RSS readers, but ran into a bit of an issue.
But Why?
This is actually something I’ve been meaning to do for a while. I don’t advertise on the site, so it’s not as if I’d be losing out on advertising revenue by giving you the entire article in one shot. I myself prefer RSS feeds that give me the goods, so it only seems fair I do unto others.
Strangely, what should have been a simple setting change in WordPress ended up being a bit of a convoluted pain in the ass. I’m noting it here, in case anyone else has the same trouble. If you don’t, you can skip the rest of this post and go back to your regularly scheduled porn.
WordPress and Feedburner Hate Me
Normally, if you want to change whether your WordPress feed displays a summary or full-text, it’s as simple as going to SETTINGS > READING in your WordPress admin and changing the setting.
For some reason, this didn’t work for me – the feed still showed only post summaries. I cleared my WP-Supercache. Still only summaries.
When I tried using the RSS2 url, and updating that in Feedburner, Feedburner threw an error telling me my feed was over 512k, which is the limit for their source feed size. Thing is, it wasn’t. Not even close. Not even with my long-winded, rambling posts. My limit for the maximum number of posts to display in a feed was 10. Upon seeing that error, I reduced it to 5, for shits and giggles, even though I knew the 10-post feed was well below 512k. Then I tried 3. Then 2. No matter what, Feedburner insisted my feed was over 512k.
Strangely – and I admit I haven’t delved deep into the core code for WordPress in a while, so this may be expected behavior – when I use /feed/rss/, the feed header returns as expected and the feed source displays in Web-Sniffer (although it’s still limited to only summaries). When I use /feed/rss2/, Web-Sniffer tells me that it’s 301 redirecting back to /feed/. When I use /feed/atom/, it displays the full-length feeds as expected.
Without boring you with the painfully detailed process by which I figured this out, the solution ended up being to use the WordPress atom feed as the source url. I have no idea why this works, or what is ailing Feedburner, but there you have it. So, atom it is.
