End-User Options - Trim newsfeed content

Hello!

A friend of mine pointed me to this:
He's running a quite popular forum about computer security and many websites use his newsfeed. The problem is that the newsfeed publishes the full content of the thread so that the users don't have to go back to the original source. Additionally some webmasters don't even post information on the original source.

This modification let's you choose wether you want to have the full content to be published or only the first 50 (or 100 or 12 , ...) characters.

It basically turns this:

Thread title
Hello, I've found quite some interesting stuff at http://www.mrnase.de and the best of all - it's free! Go and check it out!

into this:
Thread title
Hello, I've found quite some interesting...


This modification has two settings, one to turn it completely off and one setting which let's you chose how many characters you want to display. Default is '50'.

It has been tested with the RSS2 feed (seems to be the most common one).

The instructions are simple, you have to edit external.php and import one new product.


Before:Attachment 52759

After: Attachment 52758

[Steve B]

Downloaded and overwritten...everything running great now thanks

Clicked INSTALL.

[furst]

Thanks a whole lot, I've been searching for a way to do this for a long minute now.

Could I bother you so much as to have you create something that would allow me to add a footer template of sorts to the rss2 feed? I want to insert a banner with a referral code into the bottom of every rss2 item. This would be similar to the "Add your logo to the RSS 2 Newsfeed" hack you made for 3.0.

It would also so be real nice if I could add "digg this"/"add to delicious" etc links to the bottom of each item (like feedburner does it), but this is probably asking for too much. If you don't know what I'm talking about, check out this feedburner feed of John Chow's blog: http://feeds.feedburner.com/JohnChowDotCom


Edit: I just checked the feed from your site, and it isn't trimmed. I guess this isn't working for 3.6.2 yet?

[ben07]

Doesn't seem to work on Vb3.6.2

[leedjc]

Any chance of getting this to work for 3.6.4? I need this badly!!

[The Finman]

My problem is exactly the opposite.

The news feed threads my RSS bots post are too short (often not even a full sentence).

I was told that there is nothing I can do, as the publisher of the RSS feed controls the limit on how much is released.

So given that set of circumstances I doubt it would be possible, but still I am wondering if anyone knows of a possible way to overcome that limitation?

I've tried looking for longer headline news feeds, but all the ones I've found still have the same problem.

I am looking for a US headline (or breaking) news feed that publishes at least 1-2 paragraphs, if anyone knows of one. I've tried using various search engines looking for RSS news feeds that publish the length of their news feeds, but no one seems to give out that information.

[RaZor Edge]

Sad to see this do not seems to work with 3.6.5 :-(

I would really like to use something like this.

[RedTyger]

I have a suggestion why don't you also allow users the option to trim by percentage of the total content? Perhaps if the content is longer than X characters? That way it could mean that a good proportion is always included even if the full length is very short or very long.

Oh and PS, external.php has hooks!

[Cybershaolin]

Yep, does not work for me either in 3.6.5.

Edits done in external.php

Hack activated with "Yes" and Number of words set at "100".

I still see the whole posts... not trimmed at all.

Is the hack still supported? Any plans to make this work with 3.6.5?

[Legende]

Any news on this?? Or other solutions?

[tpearl5]

I will be trying this later