Solve the Partial Feeds Problem With Google Reader

The primary motive of RSS as a technology is to help you get new articles from a number of blogs in your feed reader so that you don’t need to visit them separately one by one. Hence this saves a great deal of time and effort and also helps you to stay updated with the latest happenings in your area of interest.

However this has also resulted in spammers scraping blog feeds and stealing content from blogs. Due to this many blogs do not publish full feeds and instead just give an excerpt of the entire post in the feeds. For a reader this could be quite time consuming if he needs to visit different blogs again and again and switch back and forth between his feed reader and the website.

But fortunately, Google Reader has an excellent feature which takes care of this problem. Its pretty simple and I’ll mention it step by step:

1: Create a tag named ‘ Partial feeds ‘ and add this tag to all the subscriptions which have partial feeds

2: Now go to Settings in your Google Reader and click on Goodies. There go under the heading ‘ Put Reader in a Bookmark ‘ and there first select Partial feeds tag from the drop down menu. You will get the corresponding Next button.

3: Just drag this button to your bookmarks toolbar to create a bookmarklet. And you are done ! Now if you click on it, it opens each post which has partial feeds and also marks them as read in your reader.

This can actually a very nice way to read blogs which publish huge number of posts everyday and have partial feeds. For example, some of the Wired blogs. If I just want to read those blogs post by post, then I can add a tag named ‘ Wired ‘ to the blog feed and create a similar button and make a bookmarklet out of it. Then clicking it will help me read it post by post everyday.