Don’t Use Full Text RSS
Tuesday, January 24th, 2006I have had a conversation since I posted my original article titled - Use Full Text RSS - which has changed my recommendation slightly regarding how you should implement RSS on your blog (whether to use full or summary text). I still believe in everything I wrote regarding using full text RSS but I have since modified my opinion on how best to implement an RSS strategy.
RSS Scanning
Just as some people prefer to scan headings in articles to determine what they want to read the same goes for RSS. While personally I dislike seeing summaries in RSS feeds forcing me to click through to the web page version of the blog article I realize some people prefer summaries so they can scan quickly.
My opinion is that both full text and summaries should be available and the options should be the responsibility of the RSS reader software to provide, not the blogger, giving the power to the user to choose which format of RSS they want to read. For the moment though many RSS readers don’t allow the option and of course as long as bloggers only activate the summary version within their blog software feed readers will only be able to offer summaries.
Offer Both Options
The best solution is to offer both a full text and summary RSS feed from your blog so your readers can choose which to subscribe to. This isn’t necessarily an easy thing to implement depending on which blogging platform you use. If you don’t have the ability to control and switch between full and summary text for your blog feed than using a service like FeedBurner can help you to do it.
Using FeedBurner To Create Multiple Feeds
Using FeedBurner you can create two feeds that both draw from the same root feed from your blog. Within FeedBurner you can change the option and choose how much text to show (truncate) your RSS feed. Simple create two feeds, call one ‘full’ and the other ’summary’, use the truncate function within FeedBurner to limit the feed for the summary version and then link to them both on your blog.
It’s definitely not the best solution but given the variables involved with all the different blogging platforms it’s the most widely applicable method. I suspect as blogging software evolves more and more options will become available to control your feed. If you presently use WordPress, which I use, you get reasonably good control over your feeds. Services like Blogger unfortunately don’t provide much control over your RSS feed so the sooner you upgrade to a professional solution the better.