An RSS feed is a “Really Simple Syndication” or “Rich Site Summary”, which basically allows readers to receive real-time (within 30 minutes) updates when their favourite blogs or websites add new content.

There are a number of  RSS feed readers available that will allow you to easily access new content from all your favourite sites, in one place.

But some webmasters and bloggers choose to only publish “short feed” RSS – this means when you look at the new content in your RSS reader, you only get to see a portion of the text and have to visit the actual website to read the rest.

While this might drive traffic to the website, it’s frustrating for us as readers to only see these short feeds. A long feed RSS, which shows the new content in its entirety, is much easier for us as readers – we get to see the entire post in one, simple, streamlined location.

But there is good news – there are a number of services, such as Full Text RSS" href="http://feedsapi.com">FeedsAPI that you can use to take a website’s short RSS feed and convert it into a long feed before subscribing.

As a webmaster, it’s important to weigh the pros and cons of short RSS feeds vs long RSS feeds before deciding which option works best for you – and, more importantly, which option your readers will prefer.

FeedsAPI makes it incredibly easy to turn shortened rss into full text rss feeds