syndicated posts and not truncated and not truncated

Hello!

I have a customer whose blog has syndicated posts feeding into it, now and then he writes directly in there. I have managed to sucessfully truncate both types of posts with this code:

<?php if (is_syndicated()) :
               // Strip down to an excerpt
               $text = get_the_content(); $text = strip_tags($text);
               if (strlen($text) > 300) :
                    $text = substr($text, 0, 300).'<br /><a href="<?php the_permalink();?>" class="dark-button">Read More</a>';
               endif;
               print $text;
          else :
               the_excerpt( __( 'Read More', 'xxxx' )  );
          endif; ?>

However we need the first post to be the whole post. I tried (with my limited skills) and the post ended up repeating in the truncated version underneath.
So:
1. Does anyone know how to have the first post show up as the whole post and not be repeated in the truncated versions underneath?
aaaand (one more)
2. We would really like for the first image in the post to show up in the truncated version. Is this possible?