Update: As depressing as it is, my friend let me know that this tutorial does not in fact solve the RSS character limit. I don’t know how I did it, but some time between writing this tutorial and tinkering with my WordPress/Feedburner settings, I somehow figured out how to destroy the character limit on my RSS feed. You can try what I wrote below, but my friend says it doesn’t work and I think I believe him. If you do know the real answer to this annoying issue, please let me know in the comments! Good luck!
RSS Feed (Feedburner) Character Limit Dilemma
If you’re anything like me, you probably have some sort of smartphone, and read tons of blogs via your phone’s RSS reader – mostly when you’re on the toilet. I personally use RSS Hub on my Windows Mobile Phone. Reading blogs with the RSS hub while sitting in the bathroom is all fine and dandy, but what happens when you only get a little excerpt of the post, then it says “Read more online”? You have to click the link, wait for your mobile browser to load, then fumble through trying to read the mobile rendered edition of the blog. Even if your mobile browser shows the desktop view of the webpage, it’s still annoying and time consuming.
So why do I care?
Because for the longest time, my blog had one of those feeds that made you click the “Read more online” link. Jeremy Shoemoney’s freaking feed shows the full text of his blog posts in the RSS hub, so why the heck didn’t mine? Well my friends, wouldn’t you like to know….
Presumption:
You, yourself have a blog with a Feedburner RSS feed and your feed looks something like this (in a browser):
Or this (in the RSS hub on your windows mobile phone):
You have asked WordPress support WTF your RSS feed character limit is being cut short. There is nobody else on the net that can tell you why this is happening. You’re super frustrated.
The Solution:
1. Log in to your Feedburner account.
2. Click on your feed.
3. Click the ‘Optimize’ tab.
4. Click ‘Convert Format Burner’.
I’d be willing to bet that your feed says RSS 2.0 right now.
5. Click the dropdown button and select ‘Atom 1.0′.
Activate it, and you should be good to go!
Test it!
Now revisit your feed, and it should show all of the images, and 100% of the text, even in the RSS Hub on your Windows Mobile phone! Happy toilet reading!
I hope this helped you out, and I’d be glad to hear any comments on my solution, or any drawbacks of Atom 1.0 if you know of any. I know The Hat and I have been trying to figure this out for a while.
My new, full feed can be seen here.
I also changed my feed address, so if you subscribed, it will no longer work. Sorry! I figured I’d change it now while I only have like 15 subscribers as opposed to changing it when I have tons more. The new address is http://feeds2.feedburner.com/eliteeternity as opposed to what it was before http://feeds2.feedburner.com/eliteeternity-feed.
