The Return of the Full Post RSS Feed
Comments: 7
By popular demand (well, OK, Daniel — but he’s popular!) I’ve reinstated a full-post RSS feed in addition to excerpts and comments.
In the feed lot we now have:
I’m not entirely convinced that sending everything down an RSS pipe (i.e., photographs) is abiding by the spirit of the thing, but at least now you have a choice, and if you never want to visit this site again, well, now you don’t have to.
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Posted to MetaStuff • 2003.04.17 (Thu) • 09:09
Comments
Posted by Kurt 2003.04.17, 11:55
well, count me as one who is now using this….but i’ll still visit, i promise :)
Posted by Scott 2003.04.17, 21:34
I wonder if you (or me) can start a discussion on full-post RSS feeds? If this is the trend why don’t we just have a XML page and be done with the design? I don’t like full RSS feeds and will never provide them myself. What use is a design when no-one in the future (or now) doesn’t look at it?
Posted by jh 2003.04.17, 23:06
Scott —- I’m quite ambivalent about full-post feeds and appreciate your bringing it up in these terms. Very interested to hear what you and others think.
If this is the trend why don’t we just have a XML page and be done with the design?
This is pretty much the reductio ad absurdum of the full-post approach. Yes, people still need to visit the site to post comments, but this doesn’t nullify your point. (People don’t need to visit the site to read comments in some cases —- here, for example —- because comment feeds are available also.)
As far as my own RSS reading habits are concerned, there are some sites that I do read in full-post mode but, to use an inadequate terminology, these are B-list sites for me. With A-listers, I’m happy to click through (the quality of the excerpts plays a part in my estimation of a site: specifically written excerpts that act as leader paragraphs trump the default approach of skimming the first 20-odd words in a post). In fact, most A-listers are still visited by typing in URLs or clicking on bookmarks.
As much as I’d love to be on everyone’s A-list, I understand that my little site is going to be nothing more than an occasional diversion for a lot of its readership, so I’d like for the delivery choices to be available. There may be technical considerations to weigh —- processor overhead, bandwidth usage —- but I’m hardly at a level of traffic where I need worry about these things (and as for bandwidth, mightn’t it be possible to argue that a full-post feed could save bandwidth because people wouldn’t be downloading all the ancillary graphics and whatnot —- yes, OK: the design?).
What I do worry about is the nature of the format itself. RSS was supposed to be —- am I wrong or old-fashioned here? —- a simple way to syndicate ‘content,’ out of which grew the idea of using it to stay updated with sites via the excerpts that got baked into the feeds. If it’s asked to do more and more, then it’s only a matter of time before it gets its own blink tag and we start thinking wouldn’t it be good if we had a nice, low-impact way of staying up to date….
None of this, however, is meant as refutation. As someone who takes what little pride I can in being able to come up with a site that looks halfway decent, I completely understand your concern about design going out the window. Antipixel’s as narrow as it is, for example, in order to accommodate a 12-word measure which ought to make for easier reading than these pages that play tennis with your eyeballs from one side of the screen to the other. I hope that people enjoy the look of it and find it easy to read and leave subconsciously thinking that they’ve been cared about. I know you feel the likewise because you’ve put the same effort into Darklemon.
I really don’t have any answers, but here’s how I think it needs to play out. A site’s writing or photography ought to convey an intelligence or spirit or presence that’s intriguing enough to make the reader wonder what the site looks like. People will see it, and then they’ll fall into an initial (fluid) position on a continuum of reading behaviour, from never visiting again to hitting the reload button constantly, stalking you and eventually becoming the object of restraining orders. Most people will fit somewhere in the middle, finding their own balance between feeds and fronting up.
Posted by Jeff 2003.04.19, 12:17
The way I look at it is like this:
The design of a site is important. Having a nicely designed site is fun and professional, but what is the real point of a website, especially a weblog? To me the point is what you are saying - the words, the thoughts and ideas. By providing an RSS feed, I make it easier for more people to read what I say.
As jh just pointed out, not everyone will think to go and read your site all the time, but with an RSS aggregator it is much easier for them to read it. Despite your content being in the RSS reader, it is likely that some readers will still visit your site, maybe not as many, but some will still visit. The important thing, however, is that more people might read what you write. To me thats what it all comes down to. All this fuss about weblogs is, on a fundamental level, the ability for anybody to write and be heard and if RSS feeds with full posts in it get your message out to more people, then that’s an amazing thing.
Posted by Anonymous 2003.04.22, 12:42
Blogs open a communications channel not seen before. Not everyone uses a browser to view a web page. Maybe we will see more phone makers use xml over their propreitary html to display content (for instance in Japan Imode and J-Sky have significant differences in their markup language). Let people view the content the way they what to see it.
Posted by Darga 2003.11.05, 01:06
Yes as told by the other members RSS feeds makes things simpler. A visitor need not go through all the content in the blogs he can just just check the RSS feeds for the updated ones…
It is applicable not only to blogs but alos to news sites and other sites which regularly change their content.
Posted by kevin 2006.09.18, 11:34
I had no idea RSS feeds were so simple.
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