RSS Format Philosophy
Chuq and me are having an interesting discussion about whether an RSS-Feed of a blog should contain the full body of a post or not.
What do you think?
Full body? Excerpt? How long should the Excerpt be? Should there be 2 feeds - a full and an excerpt feed?
Personally i don't mind reading blogs in my webbrowser if there is an added value. For instance reading Zeldman's blog in a webbrowser makes sense to me because it is a very well designed site and a pleasure to my eyes. And even Zeldman is providing a "full" feed.
Other blogs (like Chuck's) are interesting to me purely because of the content. And to get hold of that "pure content", an RSS Aggregator like the brilliant NetNews Wire Pro is sufficient if not better suited for me (reading grey text on white background isn't a pleasure for my eyes) - it saves a click and an additional app.
After all, i like to read Chuck's posts, why else did i subscribe to them. So why shouldn't he provide his posts in a format i (and maybe others) prefer, given his reason for blogging is that he believes others are interested in what he has to say.
So what do you think? Comments?
Comments
1
[UPDATE]
you're right. Zeldmans own feed often also only includes excerpts.
Sorry about this, i didn't realize that i subscribed to a third party feed of Zeldman and not his own feed.
The feed is subscribe to is:
http://www.them.ws/feeds/?feed=zeldman
Posted by: Stefan Seiz | July 23, 2003 1:21 PM
2
Zeldman provides a full feed now? All I see is the excerpts... Anyway, I definitely prefer full feeds over excerpts. And I only think it's necessary to provide one feed, unless bandwidth is a huge issues with you.
Posted by: Andy Baio | July 22, 2003 11:50 PM