I use a feed reader and collection of feeds to stay on top of interesting writing and news from around the web. Consistent with my own preferences, I offer RSS, ATOM, and JSON feeds for following The New Leaf Journal and feature them in a feed directory. While I encourage people to enjoy The New Leaf Journal however they see fit, I suppose we can say that using one of our feeds along with a feed reader is the officially promoted method of following the site. I recently wrote about discovering some stats in our server logs highlighting our modest-but-growing feed following.
While I do not offer full archive feeds (our feeds include our 15 most-recently published articles), I do offer full text feeds. That means that if you add one of our main feeds to your feed reader, your feed reader should fetch the entire article, allowing you to read without leaving your reader (although I hope you visit our site proper once-in-a-while, especially for photo-heavy posts).
Or should I say I usually offer full text feeds?
On the evening of July 10, 2025, I checked the settings for our SEO plugin, The SEO Framework, after noticing that our sitemap, which is generated by the plugin, had an unfamiliar color scheme. I learned the cause of the sitemap color issue — all of the plugin settings had reverted to their defaults. I suspect the fault lies with me rather than the plugin. I had been clearing out unused options from our database and reducing the number of WordPress options set to autostart from July 8-10. The SEO Framework plugin has a few features related to WordPress’ default feeds. One of these features is a check box for “Convert feed entries into excerpts?” I had this disabled because I want feed entries to be full text. But the default setting is to enable excerpts. I unchecked this box and went back through my settings to re-configure the plugin.
If any of our feed subscribers found one of our recent posts as an excerpt in their reader instead of a full article, I can happily report that this was unintended and the issue has been resolved. The New Leaf Journal will continue to offer full text feeds to ensure that our feed subscribers can choose how to enjoy our articles (I nevertheless recommend visiting the site proper now and then since I have worked to make it reasonably aesthetic and posts with significant numbers of images look best on site).
Is there a lesson here? I suppose WordPress admins should check all of their settings once in a while to make sure everything is set up properly. There was an issue with our page caching plugin a couple of weeks ago that I had missed for at least a few days, and given that I have not had as much time to work on the site of late as I would like, I could have easily missed the feed issue for longer than I did (granted I usually make an effort of checking our feeds in my own feed reader). Lesson two is probably to be careful when messing with anything in the WordPress database.
