Starting today, you can read entire MinnPost articles from within our RSS feeds. Previously, we only offered a headline (and sometimes an excerpt) and you had to click a link to read the full text at our website.

RSS stands for “Real Simple Syndication - it’s a format for content distribution that you can use on your desktop or phone to capture content from authors and sites you select. If you are not using RSS feeds, then this announcement is a little lackluster. However, we’ve listened to the thunderous disappointment from our readers who subscribed to our feeds and could not read the entire article. We hope those readers now will spread this good news.

If you are currently subscribed to our RSS feed, you will need to update the RSS feed link to see the full articles. We will publish a short note in the old feed with instructions. You can also find all the new RSS feed links at our RSS Feed index page. We apologize for this inconvenience.

Subscribing to our full article RSS feeds is still free, even to non-members. (But we will keep reminding our non-members that we need your support.)

Along with these full article feeds, we created a new RSS Feed sponsorship opportunity using MinnPost’s Real-Time Ads platform. MinnPost RSS Feed articles will feature a message from a paying advertiser, under the header, “MinnPost.com Full RSS Articles brought to you by:” We will decide what to charge for this sponsorship when we have subscriber data within a month. We are using Feedburner (powered by Google) to publish our RSS feeds and track subscriptions.

In the meantime, we have launched these new RSS Feeds with a Real-Time Ad from Ed Kohler -- Ed writes The Deets blog and has been republished on MinnPost many times. Ed has also helped me with both the Real-Time Ads platform and the full article RSS feeds.

If you are interested in buying this new RSS Feed Real-Time Ad, please inquire with Sally Waterman, swaterman (at) minnpost dot com.

If you are not an RSS user, and want to be, here are some places to go to learn more or get started:

RSS Resources

Download.com: How to read RSS feeds and get started.

RSS on Wikipedia: The history and usage of RSS.

Yahoo.com RSS Page: AP News RSS feeds and more.

Browser Based Aggregators

Bloglines (free)

Google (free)

Windows

Feed Reader (free)

FeedDemon (shareware)

About.com (list of free Windows News Aggregators)

Mac OSX

NetNewsWire Lite (free)

RSS Menu (free)

Pheeder (shareware)

Newsfire (shareware)