Okay, I think I have the RSS feeds figured out. Maybe.
Here is what I’ve found out about why (some) folks are magically seeing partial RSS feeds from my blog all of a sudden, when I’ve told it to distribute full ones.
It turns out an RSS feed has two data components embedded, a <description> and and <content:encoded>. If you enable full RSS feeds, the full data goes into <content:encoded> but the description continues to be the wordpress excerpt, which if you don’t flag an explicit excerpt, is 50 words.
It also turns out some feed setups (firefox, evidently) use the <description>. Others use <content:encoded>. Google Reader seems to use <description> when you’re viewing a feed for subscribing, but the <content:encoded> for reading, so it does both, confusing the hell out of things until you figure this all out. It took some serious geeing into the raw feed data and some inspired googling to understand this (sigh).
So, it is perfectly possible to be pushing a full RSS feed and having people seeing a partial feed depending on their reader type. and yes, googling this shows I am not the first person to trip over this.
Lots of poking and prodding of the feed make it clear the full feed IS in there. As well as a truncated <description>. This is a feature, not a bug.
My solution: there is a wordpress plugin called “Excerpt Length” which lets you set the excerpt length (duh). I installed that, and set it to 3000. If I get THAT wordy in one post, you will thank me for truncating it. So now the <description> has the full text in it, unless I specifically choose to write an excerpt, which I rarely do. So this should work for everyone, at the cost of a larger RSS feed file.
Why did this suddenly start showing up on upgrading to the new look and feel? I don’t know. but my best guess is that the RSS files are being distributed with a different mime-type than the old one; probably actually following the standards, where the old one probably didn’t.
I could be wrong. Since this seems to fix things, I’m not really motivated to dig into the gory details. My testing shows it seems to be fine now. you?
chuq (more geeky fun for a friday than I’d planned for!)
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