I'm in total agreement with you. Even though I usually go a site to read a post, there are times when I can't be bothered. The thing is -- it's not to hard to provide both. That's what I do.

I'd been told in the past not to provide full posts, and then I thought that maybe there might be quite a few folks who found them useful.

It's simple really, as you say, just provide both.

Here's another vote in favor. I prefer full posts, too. Not for reading in an aggregator, but for *selecting what to read in the browser*. If I can't easily determine whether an article is interesting enough to spend some real time on, then it gets none of my attention at all. For users like me, a full post feed not only isn't a substitute for visiting the website, it is the main reason for constant visits to a given site.

I recently coded up an RSS system for my home-made editor, and at the time I thought long on this topic. I decided not to deliver a complete post via RSS. Why? For one thing, I like control over how my words are displayed, which I don't have with RSS. My brilliant rumination might be thoroughly exposed for a ridiculous sham in 14pt Comic Sans MS, or whatever. But more importantly, I want to entice people into the strange, untidy universe I've grown there, of which my blog is but one component.

I coded my feed to take the headline, and everything up to the end of the first paragraph of each post. So I did that, then fired up FeedDemon, and discovered that I have a habit of beginning my posts with one short paragraph, usually just a sentence. Ideally, I'd like to make the feed take the first two or three paragraphs, so that short posts are displayed in full, and longer posts are given enough time to develop. However, I'd have to think about the perl regex, and I haven't got round to that.

But anyway.

I regard your dilemma rather differently. I agree entirely that bloggers need to pay attention to their RSS feed. But what I think they should do, if they don't want to deliver each post in its entirity (something I do admire, by the way), is plan for it in their posts. If their excerpt takes the headline and the first forty words, those words have peculiar agency on the rest of the post, because in a sense they determine how large its audience will be. This is how newspapers approach the problem of getting people to read long opinion pieces or features.

So I'm trying to write longer and more interesting first paragraphs. My point is that this is a writing challenge, to find forty words, or a paragraph, et cetera, that emits a siren's call to the syndicatees. This is entirely positive: once you have found those words, they will impose a certain standard upon what follows.

Angie: I've been reading you via RSS for a while, and I just thought I'd point out something. In both the aggregators I use (FeedDemon and Newzcrawler), your full-content feed is stripped of HTML... which renders much of your content (assorted sweets in particular) impossible to read without clicking through.

The reason? You've got an HTML-stripped, no line-break version of your content in the description, with the full HTML version in content encoded. Every app I've tried gives precedence to descriptions when they're present in a feed, so I'm stuck with a mass of strange, run-on sentences.

Given your stated preferences, I thought you might wanna know. :-)

Wow. Thanks, Roger, for pointing this out! In Bloglines (my aggregator of choice), it uses the <content:encoded> field for display.

And here's where I admit my total ignorance for this, because I thought that's what most aggregators used. They use the description field, really?

I'm not sure how to fix this - but I will investigate.

Off to Google I go... and thanks again, Roger, for pointing this out.

OK, I think I've got it all figured out.

Roger, I've tested the full posts feed in FeedDemon, and it shows up, HTML included, just fine. My guess is you were using the RSS 0.91 version of my feeds, which I stopped linking to from the site about a year ago, but I guess some people are still subscribed to.

I've updated the old RSS feeds to point people to the new ones (hopefully).

Thanks again Roger!

great post Angie... totally agreed, and it's why I offer multiple feeds to my site... I'm trying to give my readers as much choice as I can.

I prefer full post feeds as well, though I don't fully understand how to develop a template to offer the entire blog entry. I got some templates that include comments, though, so that's something. I'm not sure how many, if any, readers actually use the RSS feed, but use it myself to see how entries display. :)

for all that are using RSS, you can steal my RSS templates here:

http://www.inluminent.com/weblog/archives/2004/01/16/steal_my_rss_templates/

oops, I meant "for all using Movable Type" ...

You go, GIRL! :D

I totally agree with you and have emailed several blog posters asking them to change their templates. It would have made more sense to actually say how to change the rss changes. I've posted the instructions for Movable Type on my website at http://www.absoblogginlutely.net/mtblogarchive/003329.php

Good note, Andy. Thanks to everyone for posting their comments and opinions. I should also mention that a lot of Movable Type blogs are notorious for this.

A good explanation, including templates that you can just copy and paste (it's the one I used for angiemckaig.com) is available here:

http://feedvalidator.org/docs/howto/MovableType.html

Full text feeds without any formatting, that is what is supposed to be RSS in my view.

Hmmmmm interesting !!! Great points, and thanks for the folks who listed how-to links. I find the abbreviated posts frustrating, and have been lagging in trying to figure out how to update the RSS templates from MT (though this may now be a futile effort) and am embarassed to feed junk. Fortunately, I doubt I have any RSS subs to offend.