Mark Pilgrim struggles with RSS feeds and aggregators: ‘I don’t use my aggregator to read things; I use it to find things to read. I tried the whole “read everything in your aggregator” thing, and it depresses me. It reminds me of when I used to smoke, and everything tasted the same.’
Odd, I completely disagree. Background: I’ve never smoked. I use my email client as my aggregator. I came to weblogs from mailing lists, where everything looks the same but you distinguish posters by style and tastes. I tend to only eat plain things and I’m constantly asked why I’m so boring and don’t try exciting new flavors. I enjoy the depth of flavors in the things that normal people would find plain or undistinguishable (microwaved bagels (drool!), pasta, rice, milk). I find Mark’s current website design unattractive and uncomfortable to read.
Now here are some reasons I think that the full text should be included in the RSS feed: Pages take a while to load. When going through a lot of items, this kind of page loading and context switching can really slow things down. In my email client or desktop aggregator, I can read through the day’s news without having a live Internet connection. This makes me more productive.
Now here’s a technical RSS 1.0 note: I suggest keeping excerpts the way they are now in the <description> tag, but using the <content:encoded> tag for a CDATA-encoded version of your HTML. This is what I do for my own feed (MT template available upon request). I would like this to be the default setting for MT and other blogging software.
posted August 05, 2002 09:44 PM (Technology) #