Full or Partial RSS Feeds

Full Text RSS Feed now available: I've been reading the comments at Full Or Partial RSS Feeds - The Great Feed Debate and it seems that most people want to read feeds in "Full" format - that is, all text from the original article.

At first, this made absolutely no sense to me. The purpose of RSS was to notify us of new material, not push the news upon us. Getting full feeds seems contrary to that goal.

However, it seems that there is an over-riding reason, and that apparently is driven by consistency: rather than a jumble of differently formatted websites, reading full feeds in a newsreader or even a browser presents every feed in the same way. I can certainly see the advantage of that.

But what about people with email subscriptions? Surely they don't want full feeds? I turned feed management for all my sites over to FeedBurner just to escape the annoyance of keeping track of email subscriptions, and I don't want it back. It's easy enough for me to produce multiple feeds, one full and one partial, and that takes care of people who want one or the other, but what about FeedBurner? I'd rather people subscribe that way because it's easier for me to track subscriptions, and I don't want to tick people off by changing it suddenly. Only a quarter of FeedBurner subscriptions are email, but that's over 100 people.

Is part of the answer to cut back on the number of items in the feed? I've always put the 15 latest in, but I don't thing that would make sense if I did change to full.. maybe 4 or 5?

Well, for those who do want full feeds, I added it: Site News (direct, no FeedBurner,full text). I'm not going to change FeedBurner unless a whole bunch of people tell me to..

See Full or Partial RSS feeds also.

3 comments

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Wed Sep 12 14:35:20 2007:   Niall


Thanks! I actually read a lot of my subs on a mobile device, so not having to go to sites to get the full text is a huge time saver.



Thu Sep 13 14:11:06 2007:   bruceg


Thanks for the full text feeds - I read most of the news in NetNewsWire now, and it makes things much easier to read. I still view your site page, and if I am looking to purchase something related, I will click on a link, and sometimes make it all the way through checkout :-)

- Bruce




Tue Jul 13 08:46:31 2010:   anonymous


Found full feed site http://FullFeeds.org is a full RSS feed generator that can take any partial feed and convert it into a full feed or accept any URL from any website

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