How to Get Full Feeds inside Google Reader

Some websites, BBC News for example, offer only a headline and a short excerpt in their RSS feeds and you therefore have to leave your Google Reader to read the full news story.

Now there are a bunch of services - like FiveFilters, FullTextRSSFeed and FeedEx - that can quickly transform partial RSS feeds into full-text feeds but with certain obvious limitations.

First, these services can only process a limited number of feed items per day so the transformation may not work with high-volume feeds. Second, when you convert a partial feed into a full feed, you are actually creating a new RSS feed and this will only exist as long as the conversion service is in business.

If you are a Google Chrome user, there’s however a much better option that will give you the best of both worlds. You will be able to read the full text of a story inside Google Reader itself but without going through any transformation service.

To get started, simply install the Super Google Reader extension inside Chrome and it will add a new menu called “Super Settings” to your feeds page. Then choose the “Readable” option for all the partial RSS feeds that are you are subscribed to in Google Reader.

That’s it. The next time you expand a partial item inside Google Reader, this extension will automatically fetch the full content of that page in real-time and will display it in place of excerpts. You can use the ‘pre-fetch’ option to let it process the full feed in the background and this will reduce the time it takes for Google Reader to display the full text entries.

I have a quick screencast that explains how to get full feeds inside Google Reader with the help of of this super-useful extension. Thanks Nagalakshmi Viswanathan for the tip.