Which is why it’s unfortunate that many sites – Lifehacker, Techcrunch, and Wired to name a few – truncate the content in their RSS feeds. Typically you’d receive just a tease or perhaps the first paragraph of the article, where you’d then, in turn, have to visit the website directly from the feed to read the rest of the article. As a content producer I get it, it’s more difficult to monetize the RSS feeds than on the web site directly. However, it’s still frustrating for the consumer.
Users of Google Reader and the Chrome browser have an excellent solution to the problem, however. Google Reader Full Feed is a free 3rd party extension that lives up to it’s logical naming convention.
Once downloaded and installed the extension will display an icon within your address bar when viewing a truncated RSS feed within Google Reader. At this point you can use the z keyboard shortcut to expand the feed fully.
The process isn’t full proof however – the whole system is leveraged by a constantly evolving database of supported sites. Quite likely many of your feeds will already be supported; they were in my case. Users that are more technically inclined can even expand the public database by submitting the required information for the feed. Because of this, sites unsupported today are likely to be supported tomorrow.
