Expand truncated feeds

I hate truncated feeds in my reader. After subscribing to a feed that turns out to be truncated I usually end up skipping every single post for a few days and then unsubscribe.

Admittedly I’m oversubscribed (a few hundred items a day) and don’t have time to read everything, and those truncated bastards are first up against the wall. Unless they’re from blogs I really like, hi Red!

I subscribed to a few new blogs recently, and alas they were mickey teasing little truncated fuckers. So I cracked open Google to look for a hack or a plugin, but found nothing. Then I thought “Help me Lifehacker, you are my only hope.” Fired off a quick mail and to my surpsise and delight they had a post the next day. http://lifehacker.com/5523024/google-reader-full-feed-expands-truncated-feeds-with-a-keystroke.

I’m using the Chrome plugin. Didn’t seem to work for me at first, but had to do a computer restart last night and today it was working just fine. I just have to press Z and the truncated posts expand.

That’s that problem solved. Next, world hunger…

2 Comments
  • Reply Andrew

    June 9, 2010, 5:20 pm

    Hey John, I somehow missed this post, thanks for putting it up. I hate those truncated feeds too, so i’m delighted there’s something can be done about them.
    Do you know if having the feed that way is a choice the blogger in question has made? i’ve often been tempted to leave a comment or send an email asking them to sort it out, but I don’t want to do that if it’s not their fault.

    • Reply John

      June 9, 2010, 5:54 pm

      Hey Andrew. I think for a lot of the bigger sites, it’s definitely a choice. The idea is that stats go up, and they might click ads, and maybe they think they’ll be more inclined to leave a comment. But it’s a false logic. I think most people using a feed reader probably just click NEXT most of the time, and they ultimately get less readers going to the site.

      It’s possible that it is the default setup for some people when they set up their blogs though. And I bet there’s a few people with blogs who don’t use readers that much and that don’t even realize.

      Something else that’s always seemed quite pointless to me on websites is pagination. There’s a great plugin called autopager that kills it.

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