Perhaps one of the most frequent questions we get asked is if AutoBlogged can get the full post in the RSS feed rather than just an excerpt. The answer is that autoblogged can only use what the feed provides so if the RSS feed only shows partial content, as most feeds do, that is all that AutoBloged can use.

By default, AutoBlogged will create a small text-only excerpt from the content in the RSS feed, will attribute the source, and link to the original article. It will also include a thumbnail of the first image found in the post if one exists. A small excerpt, a thumbnail, and attribution is largely considered fair use and we consider it a proper courtesy to those who are are actually writing or own the content you are taking. Taking the full articles from someone else’s site without their consent just isn’t cool and is likely to get your site marked as spam and could also lead to duplicate content penalties from search engines.

Having said that, there are times when it is appropriate to take the full content or you have the owner’s consent to do so. In those cases, we recommend using wizardrss.com , fullfeeds.org, or fivefilters.org to create full content RSS feeds that you can use with AutoBlogged.

Excerpts

Note that the excerpt that AutoBlogged uses is text-only also for security purposes as people have been known to exploit autoblogs for malicious purposes.

Most RSS feeds from blogs only include an excerpt in the feed and this is the default setting for most blogging platforms such as WordPress. AutoBlogged can only work with the content that is in the feed itself, so if the feed only contains excerpts that’s all you get. You can view the contents of a feed by using our feed viewer at http://viewer.autoblogged.com/.

Occasionally some feeds do contain full content, and in that case you can access the full article by using the %content% or %content:encoded% variables in your post template (depending on how the feed is formatted).

We do recommend that you get permission to use the full feed to avoid any legal troubles and to not give autobloggers a bad name.

Excerpt Length

AutoBlogged will let you control the length of the excerpts it makes. Under the Settings admin panel there is a section for Excerpts that lets you specify a minimum and maximum number of words, sentences, or paragraphs.

Of course, this excerpt is based on the contents of the feed so it can only work with what the feed provides.

Update:  We plan to have an add-in in version 3.x that will allow for retrieving full posts.

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