Truncated feeds can be a bummer, especially if you really enjoy reading your favourite blogs via RSS. FeedsAPI is a service that will take any truncated RSS feed, expand it to a full-text feed, and then deliver the resulting stories directly to your inbox or to your preferred news reader. Best of all, it does this in real-time, so you don’t have to wait hours for stories to process.
The video above shows you how the service works. Once you’re signed up, you’ll get an access key that you can use to add and expand any feed you want to your profile. Just give the service the feed URL you want expanded or added to your collection, your access key, and some details about how you’d like FeedsAPI to handle links in the text. From there, the service will do the rest of the work.
By default, every time a story is published, FeedsAPI will expand it and email the full text to you. That’s fine for a few feeds, but once you get into dozens or more, it can overwhelm an inbox, so we’d suggest either setting up a different email address for feed reading or using a Gmail filter to pipe the articles over to a label or set of labels just for the news. Alternatively, FeedsAPI can export your subscriptions as XML or RSS to be imported into whatever feedreading tool you prefer to use, whether you’re rolling your own or using a hosted alternative.
I’ve been playing with FeedsAPI for a while now, and while it works like a charm, it’s definitely aimed at organisations that want to aggregate content for their own apps, or developers looking to build their own platform around it. That said, it still works for individuals who just want a better way to read and organise their feeds. You can try the service for free to see if it fits your needs. To continue using it you’ll have to pony up either $US54/year or $US9/month (if you don’t want to pay for a year up front). You can check out FeedAPI’s pricing plans here.
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