A Place For Stephen

My previous post about using RSS feeds on your site reminded me that I was going to write an article about modifying the content your RSS feed displays.

Now the DEFAULT setup for RSS feeds in a Wordpress install is to supply the FULL CONTENT of each post in your feed.

And that’s something I really don’t like… I much prefer to use an SUMMARY of the post - not the whole thing, especially on more “commercial” blogs where you should have more control over your marketing messages… and your RSS feed IS a marketing tool!

So from within WP Admin, click on the OPTIONS tab, and then the READING sub-tab.

Scroll down the screen and look for:

Syndication Feeds
Show the most recent: 10 posts
For each article, show:
o Full text
* Summary

And select Summary!

The click UPDATE OPTIONS.

That publishes the first hundred or so characters of your post into the <description> part of the RSS feed.

But often that doesn’t look quite right… and as I’m a bit of a control freak at times, I want to specify exactly what my visitors can see.

So when I am WRITING a post, I ALSO add in an extra introductory paragraph into the OPTIONAL EXCERPT field (that’s the field under the Upload area on your write posts screen… scroll down and have a look).

And the information I put into the Optional Excerpt field is what gets shown in the RSS Feed.

There’s also another use of this field.

If you use this piece of code:

<?php the_excerpt(’Read the rest of this entry »’); ?>
instead of
<?php the_content(’» Read the rest of this item »’); ?>

in your theme where you might normally see the full content of a post - on the index.php page for example - then you will ONLY see the text from the excerpt on that page. As you see on the home page of this blog (and most of the others I have).

It’s just a personal thing… I don’t like scrolling too much, so when a blogger forces me to scroll through the complete post after post after post scanning for something that attracts my attention… often I will tune out and go elsewhere.

Oh… and if you forget to add the excerpt when you do the post… it’ll show the starting lines of the actual post instead.

NOTE

Because the FULL portion of your post is STILL published to your feed (just in a format normally hidden from view) it means that some feed readers may still show the full post, or content scrapers (naughty software that grabs RSS feeds and places your content on other sites) will still have access to your full post.

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