So you’ve read all the debates about full feeds versus excerpts and you’ve decided that full feeds are the way to go (they are), but you’re having a little trouble making that happen? Yeah, I was, too, until I polled the savvyblogging stream on Twitter and got this very helpful tip from NerdMom:

So what does that mean.. exactly?

First, let me back up a few steps and make sure that we’re all on the same page.

First, we’ll assume that you’re already using WordPress & Feedburner.

The trouble that I was having is that my blog feeds in my WP dashboard were set to “full feed” but the feeds that Feedburner were delivering were showing up as excerpts. And I dislike excerpts so much that I wouldn’t want to put y’all through that. 😉

If you’re using WordPress, take a minute to double check that your feeds are set to full text, under Reading settings in the dashboard.

Click for full size.

If you’re using another blogging platform and Feedburner, this blogging tip may still be helpful for you, since the issue was with the feed address that I gave to Feedburner. If you’re not using Feedburner but you want to be,.. go ahead and go sign up for Feedburner real quick and then come back. I’ll wait.

Back?

Now we need to check the feed address that Feedburner is using.

If you haven’t already, log in to your Feeburner account and select your feed. Near the top, click on “Edit feed details” so you can see which address Feedburner is using for your feed.

Click for full size.

As the instructions there say, DO NOT CHANGE YOUR FEEDBURNER FEED ADDRESS. (The sky will fall on your head.) The address you want to look at is the “Original Feed” address. Does it end with “RSS” or “RSS2?” If you’re like me, mine ended with “RSS” and if you’re like me and you’re crazy brave, you can just add a “2” to the end and click save.

Because I’m crazy brave like that.

After my crazy bold move, I actually went and looked it up and here’s the dish: WordPress has RSS, RSS2, ATOM and COMMENTS_RSS built in. Even if you don’t have code in your theme to display a subscribe link to one of those, they are there, built in, so changing “RSS” to “RSS2” shouldn’t cause any problems. (If it does you can always change it back and hit save and then leave me a comment telling me how scared you were that you’d nearly screwed up your feeds. I can take it.)

Now you just need to check your feeds.

All you need to do now is make sure that your feeds are working. What’s that? You don’t already subscribe to your own feeds? Why not?? It’s not vanity, it’s making sure that if there’s ever a problem with your feeds you’ll know about it. You can’t rely on your readers to tell you (trust me on that one!) Go ahead, go subscribe to your blog. I’ll wait. …


Now log in to, wherever you get your feeds, and look at them. Do they look good? All righty then!

If you really don’t subscribe to feeds at all (I know that some of you don’t.) You can just click on that little RSS button next to “Edit Feed Details” in Feedburner and at the very least you’ll be able to see if there are full posts or excerpts. Better?

One more thing.. to dot all the t’s and cross all the i’s.. or whatever.

No sense in doing something halfway, right? Remember that part about WordPress having built-in feeds and your blog theme displaying subscribe links to those feeds? To really truly make sure that all your feed subscribers are routed through Feedburner (for accurate counting) you should really change all those links in your code to your brand new, shiny, feedburner address.

If you have even a teeny bit of code know-how, you should be able to do this. If there’s a subscribe button at the bottom of posts, that will be in your “singlepost.php, ” or you may have an RSS button in your header or footer or sidebar. All you need to do is change the address in the code from “www.yoursite.com/feed” to whatever your new feedburner address is. After you save those changes you can check them by hovering over all the subscribe buttons on your blog and checking the address that displays in the bottom edge of your internet browser.

And now you’ve mastered the Classic Housewife Full Feed Tutorial

If there were such a thing. I feel like I need to make a badge for your sidebar. “I fought full feeds and I won.” Or something. At the very least you should be proud of yourself, give yourself a big pat on the back. You did it!

And a big huge THANK YOU to NerdMom for giving me the heads up on the RSS2 issue in the first place.

Class dismissed. =)

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Amber

Hey, y’all! I’m Amber and I wear many hats. I drink a ton of coffee and I’m constantly sweeping crumbs off the floor. After 20+ years of homeschooling, we are starting over at preschool with our fourth, Lil Miss Mouse. She keeps us young and she’s the main reason for my excessive coffee consumption. Drink up!