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Most of RSS feeds nowadays only include the title and a small abstract of the posts. For this kind of feeds, is there any way to retrieve the full contents on Google Reader? So having to visit the external site to read the post is no longer necessary.

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Good question, but I think unfortunately it's the kind of thing that would need to be customised depending on the site... maybe that's a project to get started though? Making full feeds of sites that only offer partial ones? Not sure they'd like that though! – x3ja Jul 6 '10 at 4:00
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I hate sites that only do partial feeds. I've unsubscribed to more than one because of it. – Al Everett Jul 6 '10 at 11:56
They hate you for not reading the ads that pay them to write the articles you read for free ;-) – Ivo Flipse Jul 7 '10 at 8:08
Technically, you could include the ads on the rss feed as well (I think a lot of sites do that.) The situation is even worse on sites that offer a "mobile friendly layout" and redirect you to the mobile home page, forcing you to hunt down the article you were trying to read in the first place. – Leonardo Jul 8 '10 at 0:16

3 Answers

up vote 7 down vote accepted

There is at least one Greasemonkey script which can kind of get you there by actually pulling in the post from the website.

Gina Trapani's "Better GReader" Firefox extension includes a number of Greasemonkey scripts to improve the Google Reader experience, including "previews" for partial feeds.

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up vote 0 down vote

Definitely check out an experiment called Readable Feeds: http://andrewtrusty.appspot.com/readability/

Readable Feeds can filter out ads and other junk from your feeds so that you can concentrate on the content. It can even repair crippled feeds that only show small excerpts instead of the full content, saving you the time and hassle of leaving your feed reader.

Readable Feeds is brand new and there is a good chance it may fail spectacularly on some feeds. Any and all feedback would be appreciated!

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Can you not just select the subscription / or use Google Play (View Settings -> View in Reader Play) within Google Reader ?

For example Mashable gives abstracts

alt text

Say I subscribe to their feed.

alt text

and I am able to see the entire post

Example

alt text

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Actually, Mashable does include full articles on their RSS feed. You can verify it yourself by opening this link on internet explorer and selecting View Source: feeds.mashable.com/Mashable?format=xml . Other sites, like LifeHacker and PC World don't do it, the only thing they offer is the title, the abstract and a link to the article. – Leonardo Jul 6 '10 at 3:50
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Well they do not have Full Text Feeds so you will have to put it through a filter fivefilters.org/content-only – phwd♦ Jul 6 '10 at 4:10
I did not know about these filters. Thanks! – Leonardo Jul 8 '10 at 0:23
Lifehacker does have a full extract feed, check out: lifehacker.com/5489210/lifehacker-rss-feeds-do-a-little-dance – tobeannounced Jul 18 '10 at 22:05

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