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Paul Holbrook, who figured out how to shorten the RSS feeds in Limiting RSS Summaries to First Paragrah, has found his solution wanting and gone back to allowing full stories in his feed. I don't blame Paul. He doesn't like writing like a journalist -- head, deck, story -- and finds that sometimes his readers miss an important point.
Or maybe even Paul doesn't know what the one most important point will be to his readers, and by filtering to his first paragraph he risks focusing on the wrong one and failing to get his readers all the way through.
I know. It happened to me.
But that doesn't mean I want to view Paul's entire story in my News Aggregator. And I should have the choice of how I want to get Paul's feed. The only way I can get through all the feeds I track is to do a quick scan. I currently have 60 news sources (I know, that's overkill) and I add a couple a week. Using "Mark Paschal"'s Kit News Aggregator keeps the display filtered down to a reasonable size, but if all my feeds included full stories it would still be too much.
The beauty of News Aggregators is the ability to provide a quick scan summary of the day's news, and I enjoy being able to scroll quickly through the list to see what I should pursue. I know that even if I miss something, someone else in the blogplex will pick it up. With full stories I can't get that quick scan, and I lose the spontaneity that is important to me.
But what is right for me isn't right for everyone. As Jon Udell says in RSS Truncation Shouldn't Be An Either/Or Choice, the reader should be able to choose how to get the feed. Paul shouldn't have to make an either/or decision about what his readers want.
There should be a simple mechanism for allowing readers the choice of having a full or truncated feed. "Jenny Levine" has accomplished this using some server-side scripting, but it's over my head until I can learn something about cgi and php. Paul also suggests a mechanism where the author could choose what to place in the feed on an item basis. Either of these is better than the situation now.
Until Paul gets his item-by-item feature, I hope he'll consider offering a dual feed, ala The Shifted Librarian.
I'm not going to truncate this feed anymore.
After championing truncating your RSS feed to the first paragraph, I'm going back to an untruncated RSS feed. Truncation works very well if you write like a reporter. If you get everything important into that first paragraph, folks can decide if they want to click further. But sometimes I feel more like telling stories than reporting the news. And in that case, it's very hard to get everything you want to say into that first 'graph.[...] [Paul Holbrook's Radio Weblog]
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