RSS feeds fixed

As a former Radio user, I enjoyed that my RSS feed included the full body of my posts instead of just the first few words. I live in my news aggregator, and just seeing snippets of posts meant I had to click somewhere to read the full text. (Admittedly, NewzCrawler makes this easier by rendering the full-text in the same content window of the application, so the UI isn’t too jarring – but the fact remains that reading blog posts from RSS feeds with excerpts still results in a two-click process. That’s annoying.)

By default, Movable Type ships with the RSS feed generated as an excerpt. What shows up in your readers’ aggregators is just the first 40 words of the post(unless you type something separate in the “Excerpt” field, which I don’t care for). I finally found the answer for how to include the full text of my posts in my RSS feed. You can read the instructions here. (For the record, I followed the first example, which calls for replacing the tag with . At least one commenter on that board had a different option that may work for you.)

So – apologies for the confusion. Those of you reading this in your aggregator are now seeing what you saw until last week: the full text of the posts. (Apologies for the repeated posts that showed up as a result of me changing the RSS output. That’s done now – no more confusion!)

Finally, if you disagree with me and want just the excerpts, you can have that too: one of the things I like about Movable Type is its ability to save an unlimited number of outputs. If you want excerpts, subscribe to the RSS 1.0 feed.