How To: Putting the Full Blog Post Into An Aweber Blog Broadcast

OK, time for a quick, technical post. I post these as much for myself for later reference as I do readers.

PROBLEM: Aweber has a blog broadcast tool which does a great job of sending your blog posts out via email. Problem is that it takes the content of that post from the DESCRIPTION field in the RSS feed. This means that, out of the box (so to speak) you cannot send anything but excerpts of your blog posts via email.

Personally, I find this to be a rather asinine limitation on Aweber’s part, but oh well.

You have two options:

1. Copy/paste your entire blog post into the excerpt field manually every time you make a post.
2. Hack the RSS feed so that the full post goes into the DESCRIPTION field in the feed.

I chose the latter, and this hack is for Wordpress.

In the feed-rss2.php file, located in the wp-includes folder, find the following code:

<?php if (get_option('rss_use_excerpt')) : ?>
<description><![CDATA[<?php the_excerpt_rss() ?>]]></description>
<?php else : ?>
<description><![CDATA[<?php the_excerpt_rss() ?>]]></description>

Basically, whether you choose full or partial feed in Wordpress options, you’re going to get the excerpt field in that description field. Change the above code to this:

<?php if (get_option('rss_use_excerpt')) : ?>
<description><![CDATA[<?php the_excerpt_rss() ?>]]></description>
<?php else : ?>
<?php /* This hack put in to put full posts into description field for Aweber */ ?>
<?php /*<description><![CDATA[<?php the_excerpt_rss() ?>]]></description>*/ ?>
<description><![CDATA[<?php the_content() ?>]]></description>

This will put your content into the DESCRIPTION field in the RSS2 feed.

And like magic, Aweber will pick up the full body of your post and send it out to your list.

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