full text rules!

After several conversations at Gnomedex with geeks who are better at being geeks than I am, I’ve decided to put the full text of all my posts into my XML feed from now on.
I guess I hadn’t done this in the past because I wanted people to actually visit my site, but I don’t care about traffic any more. Now I just want people to enjoy what I write, in whatever format they prefer, including offline newsreaders.
In a related story, thanks for all the advice about newsreaders. I’ve been fooling around with Sage for the last few hours . . . the “discover feeds” thing is a killer app, man.

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34 thoughts on “full text rules!”

  2. You’re taking another step towards geekdom. Yes, full text in your feed would be great.
    Not that I mind coming to your site and seeing new links now and then. But, it is much more convenient to get it all in the reader.

  3. I have know idea what you’re geeking out about , but RIGHT ON!…I think…maybe…hell, I dunno =)
    Loves the blog, Wil

  6. Awesome Sauce! Thanks Wil, you have just made my goofing off at work 10 times easier (o.k. not really, but it’s still cool to be ultra-lazy and not click the link).

  7. Thanks for the full text feeds, Wil. I beg all my favorite reads to do this, but I have to admit, I figured you were too far up the “geek chain” to care what a peon blogger like me wanted! 🙂 Keep up the great blogging.

  8. I like the mystery of the pieces (partial feed). (Its some of the little mystery in my life – sad, eh?)
    But I can appreciate the draw of a new geeky option.
    Enjoy! Pixie

  9. I’ve got you in my LiveJournal RSS Feeds. I didn’t mind the partial text. It just let me know when I needed to click on over here to read it. 😉
    We definitly decided to name the little tabby kitten Wil after you. He already answers to the name! You can see a picture of him in my LJ if you want. http://www.livejournal.com/~rambeaux

  10. My LiveJournal thanks you. 🙂 Not that I mind visiting your site, but it’s so much more convenient to have everything in one place. Much like visiting Slashdot instead of having to read CNN and MSNBC and the New York Times every single day. That and your teasers were really short, so it was often hard to tell what the post was about. They’re always interesting, it’s just a question of whether I really ought to slack for the next 20 minutes to follow up. 🙂

  13. One of the other blogs I read just went that way recently (Matt Sledge of sledgeblog.com; former radio pioneer of 97X [Pow! The Future of Rock and Roll –Rain Man] and current program director of its successor).

  14. > . . . in whatever format they prefer . . .
    What if they prefer to read feeds that are NOT full-text? What if they prefer to NOT download the same full posts again and again and again and AGAIN–just in different places in the feed?
    It looks like you have been suckered in by some people who like to misuse RSS. Robert Scoble perhaps?

  15. Brian: How do you “misuse” an RSS feed as a publisher? Time and again if you give users a piece of technology, eventually they’ll settle on the “correct” way to use it — regardless of the authors original intent.
    Use it the way people want it to be used.

  16. Before casting stones on the ‘misuse’ or the like, RSS is a way to provide content in a structured way. It CAN be used for summaries, or it can be used for full feeds.
    Regarding which RSS feed to offer, I suggest offering multiple feeds. Putting the RSS banner on the page is definately needed, but there’s no reason you can’t have feeds with summaries, feeds with full text, or feeds with embedded HTML. Let the reader choose how to view the content.

  17. I appreciate having the full text in the feeds. I can always click the linky if I want to read the comments of an article or post one myself. Having two feeds, one for full-text and one with just teasers would be a good idea too I suppose.

  18. Will, I refuse to subscribe to non-full text feeds. I’d tried yours but couldn’t bring myself to click through just because of the snazzy titles.
    Now I can subscribe with no guilt 🙂

  19. I always give people the same view in RSS that they get if they come to my home page… usually the first section, so they can decide on the “I-won’t-bother-because-I-don’t-care” option, but I’m in the minority on that. I might have to reconsider!

  20. > Brian: How do you “misuse” an RSS feed as a publisher?
    By using it for full-text instead of summaries, of course–just like pushing invalid HTML on readers is a misuse of that language.
    > Before casting stones on the ‘misuse’ or the like, RSS is a way to provide content in a structured way.
    Only in the sense that pencils are a way to kill people; you can do it, but that is not their purpose.
    > It CAN be used for summaries, or it can be used for full feeds.
    And you CAN squat down and take a crap in the middle of a restaurant, but that doesn’t make it a good idea.
    If you doubt that RSS is being misused for full-text feeds, look at the source code of some full-text feeds and see which tags they are contained in: *description*. That is clear misuse. Beyond that, as I have already alluded to here and explained in more detail on Scoble’s site, full-text feeds are a waste of resources and time for those who do not want them.
    For the record, if people insist on misusing RSS, I would prefer to see two different feeds with one of them being RSS as intended.

  21. Ok what is Full Text??? I’m sorry but I’m not much of a computer geek to know these terms….
    I tried to go to the link under full text but didn’t get much of an explination and what is XML feed and how does that work…..
    I’m lost I guess….probably considered worthless right now by you computer guys….LOL!

  22. Seems that there are a number of Livejournal users who want partial text and a number who want full text. I’m in the former category (often as I’m scrolling up I think, “Someone needs to but in a “LJ-cut” until I realize it’s one of your feeds) but whatever’s easier for you. I can always unsubscribe from that and actually visit your site. Those feeds remind me to check your blog now, since the ‘box has moved.

  23. I appreciate this…I have you posted in my livejournal, and I would rarely click on the link to your page to read the full post (even when I was interested in reading all fo it) because…well…I didn’t want to interrupt the reading of all of my friends’ posts.
    Now I can have my cake and eat it to! You’re sweetness.

  24. I personally use FeedDemon – it’s pretty good. I really appreciate you opening up the XML feeds to be full text It makes my life alot easier, and even better, lets me read your stuff faster 🙂

  25. lol, we hacked around that at livejournal a long time ago. Your blog has been a syndicated feed for quite a while. While I didn’t start the feed, I’m glad it’s there. I always enjoy reading your entries, Wil.

  26. One option is to have 2 feeds – one full-post and one excerpt.
    Keeps both sides happy.
    FWIW, I use FeedDemon, so I like the full-feed, but come to the site anyway for comments. I don’t like most comment feeds.

  29. But doesn’t having full text everywhere the feed is syndicated increase the bandwidth demands everywhere.
    Like anarchists… it only works if everyone else isn’t doing it. If everyone embraces full text then you’ve got bandwidth demands going up by a large factor. It’ll turn RSS feeds into spam and people.
    Why not offer both, a full text and a headline feed?

  30. Full text does rule. I have it that way on my WordPress blog. The reader I use though uses the post links and actually links me to the post, so full text or not, that’s no biggie to me, but some really like it that way. Whether RSS was intended for that or not,
    Remember, the web was created for pages that link, not fancy databases or dynamic pages, but it is that way now isn’t it?
    The Internet wasn’t intended or designed for streaming anything, but now you can listen to music! Things change with the times!!!
    Now I am a blogger, my blog has a database, and dynamic pages, and I am a DJ for a website.

  31. Wil,
    I’ve emailed you about this in the past, and offered a solution …
    The XML feed still doesn’t have dates in it! So your entries don’t get sorted correctly, etc etc.
    Please look into that,
    Thanks,
    Robert

  32. > “Matt” Wrote:
    > Remember, the web was created for pages that link, not fancy databases or dynamic pages, but it is that way now isn’t it?
    Databases have nothing to do with HTTP or Web standards; they are just a storage medium.
    As for dynamic pages, if you mean pages that are dynamic on the server side, see above; if you mean pages that are dynamic on the client side, you do have a point, but you fail to recognize that it is only through standards (either real or de facto via browser makers) that this is possible. When Web publishers misuse the RSS standard by putting full-text between “description” tags, that is not the same thing as functional evolution at all; it is an attempt to change functionality WITHOUT evolving or branching the specification and seemingly without much regard for the ramifications of the act.
    The CONCEPT of full-text feeds is fine, but the IMPLEMENTATION sucks. There should be a proper format standard and means to prevent readers from having to download the same content again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again, etc., which is very wasteful of resources for readers, publishers, and the Internet between them.

  33. I just want a feed that *works*. I plugged this feed into Mozilla Thunderbird, and it’s wonky as hell. I get the subject lines, but nothing else. Clicking on a subject line does not display any text at all, nor does it mark the entry as being read. Furthermore, I can’t even delete the entries. Sounds like a Thunderbird problem, really, but of the dozen feeds I have, this is the only one acting badly.

  34. I think you can disregard my last comment. Thunderbird has gone completely off its nut with all of my RSS feed now. So it seems it’s just a bug that cropped up at a rather odd moment.

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