Sometime in 2008, around Wordpress 2.6 or so, the Wordpress team made an update to "fix" a bug with how "Read More" works in the RSS feeds.  Apparently the "Read More" feature was not intended to work in RSS feeds when you chose to show full posts in feeds (Settings > Reading > For each article in a feed, show > Full text).  Some users seemed to really like this "fix" but for TalkAndroid it was a nuissance because sites were using our RSS feed to reproduce our entire content on their own pages and the "Read More" tag was useful for splitting up our more original content.


After many hours of tooling around I found a reference to Customizing Read More and this handy post here which mentions enabling the "Read More" on pages aside from the main page of your blog.  Even those two pages were not enough.  I had to track down exactly where the RSS pages were and then hack them specifically to make it work.  Here's how to do it:

1. Look for the wp-includes/feed-rss2.php and wp-includes/feed-rss.php scripts in your Wordpress folder
2. Look for code that looks like "<content:encoded><![CDATA[<?php the_excerpt_rss() ?>]]></content:encoded>" and replace it with: "<content:encoded><![CDATA[<?php the_content('<strong>Read More...</strong>'); ?>]]></content:encoded>"
3. Add <?php $more = false; ?> right before the content encode portion of the RSS files.  This part is necessary because the the_post() function sets $more to 1 and this prevents the Read More from working.

The final code looks something like this:

Twitterfeed is a handy RSS to Twitter service that reads your blog's RSS feed and submits it to Twitter and Facebook.  We were using it on OverclockersClub to sync up our news with our Facebook fanpage and Twitter account, but I was less than thrilled with its performance.

If you have a Wordpress blog and use Twitterfeed Stop Now! Here's Why:

Reliability

Several times over the summer we had "feed" outtages where users complained that Twitter and/or the Facebook updates stopped.  Both times turned out to be Twitterfeed related.  The problem with Twitterfeed is that if you're not watching your feeds you won't know you had any problems until someone tells you.  Twitterfeed may have solved these outtages, but if it does strike again when will you know?  It only checks every 30 minutes at best for your feeds so you won't know for up to 30 minutes whether the updates will even happen.

Speed

Twitterfeed's highest speed setting is to check your feeds every 30 minutes.  If you're competing against other bloggers and sites,  30 minutes is a huge lag between when you write something and when your Twitter followers and Facebook fans get the news. 

Alternatives:

On TalkAndroid we never used Twitterfeed at all, instead we opted to go with a plugin called WP to Twitter for our tweets.  WP to Twitter sends the tweets the moment you publish a post, and also supports your Twitter API key if you've got one.  If it fails to tweet you'll also know right away because you get an error box in your Wordpress admin interface.  That solves both of the problems I have with Twitterfeed right there.

For our Facebook page we're using Steve Atty's excellent Wordbooker plugin.  It too posts instantly to your Facebook page or Facebook Wall.  It's a bit tricky to setup and might take some patience, but Steve is amazingly responsive on his support forum on Facebook.


If you run a Wordpress site and are using Twitterfeed, dlvr.it or another such service try the above two alternatives.  If you're running custom blog software I strongly suggest rolling your own API calls to Twitter and Facebook, which lets you brand yourself too by linking to your site instead of another service with each Tweet/FB post.


Addendum:

OverclockersClub is a custom CMS so we can't use these plugins.  We do use dlvr.it now, but ultimately a custom system to send the tweets and FB page shares via official APIs would be the "ideal" solution.