As a hardcore NewsGator user (and investor), I’ve been a heavy user of several of the NewsGator plug-ins.
As the number of feeds I monitor has increased, I have found that one of the more annoying things with some feeds is that rather than provide all the content of the article, they provide a very short description. For feeds that I skim or watch headlines, this is no big deal. However, for feeds that I read religiously, this is truly annoying. In a lot of cases, the feed publisher could easily change this (for example, Typepad feeds commonly default to 40 word digests, but it’s easy to change it to the entire content) – however, my guess is that many people don’t know this and it’s not obvious in the setup. In some cases, I imagine this is deliberate on the part of the feed publisher to drive traffic to their web site.
Fetchlinks solves this problem. It’s a simple, free plug-in to NewsGator that retrieves the entire web page for the feed. It’s simple to install (takes about two minutes) and can be configured by feed within NewsGator. You turn it on only for the feeds you want to download the full page for – the rest of the feeds remain unchanged.
Technical Note: If you are already a NewsGator User and want to know how this works:
- go to the NewsGator Subscribe Menu
- choose a feed
- click Edit
- click Rendering
- click “Use this stylesheet:”
- click the pull down menu (which probably says “default.xslt”)
- if you’ve installed Fetchlinks, then “fetchlinks.xslt” will be a choice) – select it and you are done
If you aren’t a NewsGator user, try it free for 14 days (shameless promotion acknowledged).