RSS Feed, Full or Partial?
If you don’t know what an RSS feed is, you’re not using it so you can safely ignore this whole post. A couple of weeks ago I received a request to offer a full RSS feed instead of the current partial feed that the site offers.
Now the Wordpress blogging software that I use allows me to provide either full-feed or partial feed, but not both (at least not easily). My main reason for offering a partial feed up to now has been twofold.
1) I’m really not that fond of people being able to grab the RSS feed and post the whole thing on other sites automatically. It’s not like anything I write here is amazingly original, but still I prefer people to take the information and write their own posts, not just slap mine up.
2) There’s no easy way to track people reading my RSS feed. If people come to the website they show up in my stats and I can see how popular different posts are.
3) The site is funded by advertising and if you don’t visit the site you don’t see the advertising.
And up to now I’d had no reason to think that most people cared strongly either way. So I’m throwing it open. If you use the RSS feed let me know and say if you prefer full or partial feeds, or if you don’t care for that matter.
Eoghann Irving is amongst other things the creator and Editor of Solar Flare. He has a life long interest in all forms of science fiction and fantasy and a pressing need to share this interest with anyone who will listen. Find out more at his personal website eoghann.com..
3 Comments, Comment or Ping
TC
As far as I’m concerned, partial’s fine for the reasons you stated. I appreciate you asking, though!
Feb 5th, 2006
Nicole
I’m cool with the partial feed too.
Feb 7th, 2006
Rinz
I very much prefer full RSS feeds, and thanks for providing one! I appreciate your concerns, though as for the first one: if anyone wants to steal your content they could also easily automatically scrape the HTML of your site and post the contents somewhere else. But for me, the advantage of RSS is to be able to aggregate several feeds (news aggregation is what RSS was invented for …) and get all the articles in one list so that you don’t have to open all the different websites and browse through them. This advantage is completely gone for feeds that only offer partial content, especially if it’s limited to like the first ten words (it’s more acceptable for feeds of long articles to only include the first three paragraphs or so though), so thanks again for switching to a full feed!
Feb 9th, 2006
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