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"One of the reasons it took me so long to get on the RSS bandwagon was because I didn't like what the RSS format was doing to my content, removing it from its visual and thematic context. But, you don't go RSS for the content, you go RSS to see if you want to click on to the content. Of course!"
I disagree. One of the benefits of RSS should be to provide content, not just be able to click on snippets of content. There has been a lot written about whether or not bloggers should provide the full text of their content for RSS purposes. My opinion has always been, Yes!! Why not? What are the reasons not to provide full text content? More hits to your weblog? Hits to a weblog should only matter if you are being sponsored by a company or if there are ads on your site, which in most cases, is not happening. My aggregator should be filled with the full-text of every post from every weblog that I subscribe to. Hey, one can dream, right?
Carol's weblog is powered by Movabletype and the default feeds are awful (no links, no sentence breaks, and only the forst 100 words or so) and she didn't like how the feeds looked from her weblog posts. Just in case you missed it, you can provide full text RSS to readers by doing a bit of tweaking to the RSS template.
Carol also has an interesting post on what she would do with the powers of RSS:
"My lingering response is that I'd love to syndicate the library's new books (or recent acquisitions) list. This information is already automatically generated by our ILS, but not in a very useful or extensible format. To push this information out to users, to syndicate it as appropriate into the library's many subject-specific research guides - that would be pretty damn cool."
It sure would be cool.
Posted by Steven at May 26, 2003 12:01 PMI'm kind of torn on this issue. I always thought I was doing folks a favor by keeping my RSS feed at short snippets.
I guess I liken it to looking at my inbox in email. I'm quite grateful for descriptive subject lines in my inbox that help me decide whether or not I want to read the whole email at that time or save it for when I have a little more free time.
I go through my aggregator headings the same way. It's nice to be able to decide which postings I can look at now and which ones I'll have to save for later without having to sprain my finger (I know, an exaggeration) scrolling down the page.
Thank you for giving me something to ponder - which side of the line to walk to give my readers what they want.
Posted by: Steph on May 26, 2003 11:39 PMHey Steven, thanks for the comments! I do understand that various uses of RSS are possible, and so it's fortunate that RSS provides certain flexibility. Case in point, I actually do include the full text of my posts in my RSS feed, HTML and links and all, wrapped with the "content:encoded" tag. The bare excerpt you refer to is what is wrapped by the "description" tag. Personally, I use RSS mostly, as I wrote, as a reminder to go look at something, but the full post is (and has been) included for those who use RSS feeds differently.
Posted by: Carol on May 27, 2003 12:20 AMI don't see why this must be an either/or issue. Why not provide both truncated and full-text RSS feeds? I have both available. Let the user decide what works best for them.
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