Fix Your Damn RSS Feed!
Maybe I’m missing something here, but if you are a blogger, and you don’t run ads, and you only blog because of some strange need to rant or desire to sway opinion, please explain to me why you don’t have a full text feed on your blog.
Really, I’m just about ready to cut a few of you loose. I want to read your content, but all you care to deliver to me is the first 40 words or so.
So on that list is someone who posts twice a year, but usually has outstanding content.
There’s also a freedom loving gulcher who only has amazon referrer links, and pumps her own books.
There’s another freedom loving lady, and also an ex cop who both rarely, if ever, post any pictures.
There’s also a few people who use Blogger’s free service, and who seem to like to play with the available options, and every few months they seem to toggle between teaser and full text. All of them are at full text right now, thankfully.
And finally, there is a prolific blogger with fantastic content who uses free hosting to serve all his cool logos. For some strange reason, my browser gets instructed to download all his graphic every single day that I go visit his blog, even if there’s a perfectly good copy of the exact same logo already in my cache. Needless to say, loading all his content everyday is a real dog.
If you are writing excellent content, I’ll come visit anyway to read the comments, and more than likely, I’ll leave my two cents too.
I know my feed reader has a few issues, (for instance, on multi-author blogs, I don’t always get the author’s name) and I plan on trying out a few different systems, but when I’m troubleshooting, I read the raw XML, and for you non-full text people, my reader isn’t the problem.
You want me to read your content. I want to read your content, as long as it’s not a pain in the ass, and there’s absolutely nothing on my end I can do about it if you don’t offer a full text feed (unless someone out there makes my dream RSS reader that could be programed to selectively scrape and cache content.)
Basic Tech Tip: You can read the raw feed like this (you may have to download and install cURL, but it’s available for every platform. I believe that cURL ships with Mac OS X).
$ curl http://your.sooper-duper.feed/rss.xml | more
Type at this at your command prompt.
