By nadanews on

A blog I frequent has recently moved from MT to Drupal and, while I am impressed by the layout of the new site, there is a minor problem with the feed.

Every time a new article is added to the blog, the RSS data page is updated to include the article in its entirety. This means that, when I hover above a new title on my newsreader, I end up with a tooltip box containing the entire article, instead of just the first paragraph or two. As I am unable to scroll a tooltip box, only the latter part of the article appears on my screen.

I have contacted the webmistress about this but, at this stage, she isn't sure as to how to rectify the situation. Any advice on how to fix this would be greatly appreciated.

Comments

Steven’s picture

Steven commented

The RSS feed contains the teasers, not the full bodies. You can set the automatic teaser length in the administration screen (admin -> content) but this will only affect new posts.

You can manually mark the teaser cut off location using <!--break-->. Or you can install excerpt.module from contrib which allows you to enter a separate teaser.

nadanews’s picture

nadanews commented

In this case, the RSS feed does contain the full body of the article. Thankyou very much for your assistance. I'll pass it on to the webmistress.

garym@teledyn.com’s picture

garym@teledyn.com commented

I wouldn't blame Drupal here, I'd question your RSS software -- the purpose of RSS is, as the acronym suggests, syndication of content, and that means the same on the web as it does for newspapers and television: It means to allow for affiliate re-broadcast of the content.

RSS should be the means to distribute microcontent, meaning that if I have a website where I write, I need not expect everyone in the Universe to come to my site just to read what I wrote. RSS allows people to create new services that can coallate multiple sources into new newsmagazines and reviews across a genre of sources, bringing my words to new audiences who otherwise wouldn't hear about me. So we should expect the description field of the RSS to be verbose and possibly complete, and it's your RSS software that is making the sweeping assumption that this field is only the barest summary, small enough to fit in a tool-tip.

At the very least, your software should be the place where the content is trimmed to a manageable size. If I were you, that's the author I would contact, not the content creator.

sambino-1’s picture

sambino-1 commented

Hi Steven, we've tried both of these methods with success - however, is there a way to do this without trimming the article on the index of the site? What we want to have is the whole article on the homepage, (so no "!--break -- ", but have just a teaser appear on RSS feeds.

Is there a way to do this? We are using 4.5.0 btw.