I’m a huge fan of bloggers (and podcasters and well… everyone else for that matter) using full feeds for subscribers to their sites. I’ve got no time for people who demand that I hit their website to be able to read the content. If you want to monetize the feed that’s fine, but let me read it where I want.
That said, I was contemplating this evening whether it would be possible to offer both full and summary feeds from kdmurray.net. The reason? I wanted to start pushing partial posts to Facebook with a minimum of fuss.
The problem? WordPress only supports one post feed out of the box.
The solution? Stephen Cronin‘s DualFeeds plugin (which I found thanks to @bluefur on Twitter). The plugin allows you to create multiple feeds one for full-posts, and a second for post summaries. This is a very elegant solution to the problem. Though I wanted to add the stuff into Facebook, I didn’t want to push whole posts because I did want to try and use this to drive some traffic to the site.
Technically the plugin works very well. I was able to set it up in just a couple of minutes and after about 15 minutes of testing have found that it plays nice with FeedBurner’s FeedSmith plugin, as well as my other feed-related plugin FeedEntryHeader — the latter as it turns out was also written by Stephen Cronin.
If you’ve ever wanted to be able to offer multiple feeds from your site, have a look at DualFeeds. Works like a charm.