RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is often provided in a truncated version, meaning that only the title and a short excerpt of the content you want is provided.
This can often be problematic, both if you’re using the truncated RSS feed for your own personal use and if you’re using it to curate content on your site, such as through a WordPress plugin like WP RSS Aggregator.
Now there are a number of ways that this problem can be solved – for free and using paid services – and I’ll be going through them below. Just to clarify, these are in no particular order.
Five Filters
Five Filters offers a Full Text RSS service that enables you to transform a partial web feed into the full content, stripped of any clutter or ads. This will allow you to read articles in full, whenever and wherever you prefer.
Among the list of features offered by Five Filters you’ll find speedy article extraction which uses extraction rules to ensure that you get the most accurate results possible, auto-detection for those cases where no extraction rules exist, and language detection. It also provides multi-page support, enabling articles split across a number of pages to be joined back together, customizable extraction rules for those finer extractions, and multiple formats to get your results in (RSS, JSON or JSONP).
It offers a number of pricing options. Basic is a free service, Premium is from €5 per month, Developer is on a Pay as You Go format, while Self-Hosted is a one-time €20 payment that will allow you to host the service yourself.
WM Utils
Another such service is WM Utils. Once again this is completely free and it can take a shortened RSS feed and convert it into a static full text RSS feed.
An ideal tool for any bloggers or users of news readers, this service allows you to simply copy in the URL of the truncated RSS feed and it will do the rest for you. If it’s able to extract the full-text from the RSS feed you provide, you’ll then be given a link to the newly generated full-text feed which you can open in any browser or RSS feed reader.
WizardRSS
WizardRSS is as simple a service of this kind as you will find. Just enter the partial feed’s URL and click on the Create button. WizardRSS will do the rest, providing you with the full text feed in no time.
Full Text RSS Feeds Add-on for WP RSS Aggregator
As I mentioned in the introduction, the WP RSS Aggregator plugin allows you to create a feed reader/aggregator on your WordPress site, and it’s got quite a few additional features to go along with it too.
One of these is the Full Text RSS Feeds add-on. This add-on provides connectivity to its Full Text RSS Feed Premium service that offers the full text for an unlimited number of feed items per feed source.
This add-on was designed to work in conjunction with another of WP RSS Aggregator’s add-ons, Feed to Post, which allows you to import feeds and store them as posts or any other custom post type that you might use. It provides you with the full content for these posts/articles.
Conclusion
As you can see there are a number of free solutions to the problem of partial RSS feeds (as well as some paid ones).
So if you ever come across a site that only provides a partial feed, you now know where to go.
Have you come across or used any of these or any other full-text services? What were your experiences with them? We’d love to hear from you in the comments below.
16 Responses
its good, but actually not working.
Hey Sorinfo, which service is not working?
Thanks for sharing
Thanks for sharing this
Hi Mark,
I found one free service, Full Post RSS Feed which offers premium features of Five filters, It supports upto 10 posts from the RSS feed, whereas Fivefilter allows only 5 posts.
Hope this will be good information for your readers.
Interesting article but most of the services here don’t work and/or haven’t worked for a long time. I know this article is 6 months old, but most were shuttered long before June of 16.
Full Text RSS – down
Wizard RSS – down
Feed Enlarger – up but not working
WM Utils – same
Five Filters works but only their premium service. The free ‘basic’ is just a limited tease to try to sell you the premium.
Great idea for an article, it’d be better if there were actual quality full text RSS options after the downfall of Google Reader in 2013.
Hi JFM, thanks for the feedback!
We’ll look to update this post soon and find (or create) a better alternative. We’re already looking into ways of improving the Full Text RSS Feeds add-on for WP RSS Aggregator 🙂
Full Post RSS Feed offers premium features of Five filters as free and it does not have any ads too.
Very cool list. Why is fulltextrssfeed not opening.
Thanks! It seems their site is down, perhaps the service isn’t available any more.
Hey Im pulling an RSS from a page to display on my homepage.
It displays the titles correctly, but I want to truncate the number of characters per post so
it doenst take up a long section if the title is long. How do I do that?
Hey martin, how are you doing this? Are you using WP RSS Aggregator? If so, are you also using any add-ons? Do you want to truncate the number of characters in the title only?
thank you so much. It really work:)
You’re welcome pouyan, may I ask which option you went for?
Hey John, can you open a premium support ticket please?
https://www.wprssaggregator.com/contact/
Hi Mark,
Excellent article! I have RSS Aggregator full text plugin and feed to post plugins. Unfortunately, the full text is not generating full text, just a snippet. I’ve tried many things to resolve. Nothing has worked. I just keep getting snippets with no featured image. Looks bad. I do have full text working on another site and looked at all the settings to match them up but still the problem continues. I tried EasyCron. No change. Had my host configure cron jobs on the server as I was getting some errors. They went away but the full text is not working.
Any ideas?
All the best,
John