Say it visually. (Part 1,203,343)

[yesthattom]

Here’s my nomination for the best explanation of how to use RSS feeds to read news and blog websites faster:

http://www.commoncraft.com/rss_plain_english

Comments

[awfief.livejournal.com]

That is good! I found RSS when I wanted an "lj user friends page" for folks not on LJ, and news feeds, etc.

[sfo2lhr.livejournal.com]

I'm very frustrated in trying to use an aggregator, or else I'm doing it wrong, or don't understand how RSS works. What I want is the exact functionality of my LJ Friends page -- that is, all the blogs/feeds I subscribe to, in their entirety, in (reverse) chrono order. Instead, all I seem to get are headlines or maybe a paragraph or two of a blog entry, and if I want to read the whole thing (which I usually do), I have to click on a "MORE" link, which opens the blog in a new tab/window... thereby doing exactly what I was trying to avoid by using a reader/aggregator for in the first place.

And none of the sites or readers I've tried seem to have a config option to show the entirety of entries, leading me to believe that it's possibly not under the control of the reader/aggregator, in which case RSS seems pretty broken to me, and not nearly as useful as it has been presented as.

I have tried Google Reader, Rojo, and a Mac app called NewsFire.

ideas?

[yesthattom.livejournal.com]

Blog authors can mark part of their post as before and after "the jump". The readers you mentioned (Google, Rojo, etc) just display the "before the jump" parts. In theory, if you want to read the full post you can click on the link to read it. Google Reader (which I use) is the closest thing to LJ, with a scrolling list of articles (though it is dynamically updated in the background).

If you want LJ-like functionality, use LJ! :-) You can import any RSS feed and it becomes a read-only "friend". Just add the RSS url to www.livejournal.com/syn and it takes care of the rest.

[sfo2lhr.livejournal.com]

Thanks -- I read several feeds as LJ syndications, but I thought the author had to specially enable that for LJ and register it with them.

As for the "jump", it seems to me that there should be a config option in the reader to always follow/expand jumps, just like in LJ you can set the option to always follow cuts.

In Google Reader if you click on a headline it does not seem to expand the entry in place - it opens the actual blog's web page in a new tab/window, which is exactly what I'm trying to avoid.

[ljtourist.livejournal.com]

just like in LJ you can set the option to always follow cuts

You can?!? Please tell me how to configure that, because I've been dying for that feature for many months, and can't find that option anywhere.

[sfo2lhr.livejournal.com]

It's in the Admin Console: http://www.livejournal.com/admin/console/

Disabling lj-cut tags: Type these Admin Console commands to disable lj-cut tags, so all Friends and Recent Entries pages have full entries.

set opt_ljcut_disable_lastn 1 -- Disables lj-cuts on Recent Entries pages
set opt_ljcut_disable_lastn 0 -- Enables lj-cuts on Recent Entries pages
set opt_ljcut_disable_friends 1 -- Disables lj-cuts on Friends pages
set opt_ljcut_disable_friends 0 -- Enables lj-cuts on Friends pages

The above is from FAQ Question #75 (http://www.livejournal.com/support/faqbrowse.bml?faqid=75).

[ljtourist.livejournal.com]

Awesometastic! I've banished evil lj-cuts forever! Thank you so much. That was the best 2 minutes I've spent all day.

[sfo2lhr.livejournal.com]

You're welcome! I discovered it by accident a while ago and it's been very helpful.