The Deets

Ditto - I hate it when RSS doesn’t give full text. I had a project where I was implementing RSS on a custom forum engine and the owner asked to make the default only the first x characters, while giving the forum owner the ability to expand or contract x - in order to force log-ins/authentication. Gave me a queasy feeling as someone who reads all his feeds through a reader.

I used to have full feeds, but when I upgraded my Wordpress version, it changed to summary. I just checked my prefs and while the “Full Text” option is still selected, but there is also a note about how using the “…more” feature, which I do, will cut off posts in RSS feeds.

I wish I knew of a workaround, but I don’t. Any ideas?

To add my thoughts to the debate the value of truncated feeds–
–Worst feed is merely the headline, because some people have learned the skill of writing an interesting headline EVEN WHEN IT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THE POSTING. Quite frankly, 99% of those, even interesting, headlines will not earn my click.
–Then, in the battle of full versus truncated feeds, I prefer truncated for two reasons–
1) It forces the writer to have a good lead, to get to the meat of the posting without random rambling (which I can tolerate better after I have made the conscious decision that this posting is worth my time, which is my second point–
2) Armed with a headline and the lead sentence or two, I reach a decision point–is my time more valuable than the rest of the knowledge I will gain from this click into the full posting. No, I am not Bill Gates or John Edwards, but I do have an offline life, people to meet, and 10 extra pounds to lose…so this click decision can save me from myself on those days when I get into web-surfing instead of my real surfing–okay, so I don’t surf, but skiing, running, drinking, whatever.

Truncated feeds blow regardless. The market will force people to write good heads/leads eventually anyway; no need to artificially do so by cutting up a feed.

I have a list of about 10 content sources that I’d love to never link to again due to their feed rudeness (from where I’m sitting partial feeds are borderline rude!), but their content is still a little too good, dammit. Getting closer, though!

It forces the writer to have a good lead — I don’t trust most writers to have good leads. I guess because a lot of feeds I read are from friends and I don’t expect them to be writing “articles” or masterful works. And I’ve found that a lot of people that blog “professionally” aren’t such good writers. They have good content, but you do have to dig for it sometimes. I’ll dig a little, but not much.

[...] case, I added him to a purgatory folder within my Google Reader account I’ve labeled “Truncated.” At the end of the day after reading everything else that interested me, I’d either [...]