http://www.terryfrazier.com/weblog/index/channel/userlandradio Where leaping to conclusions is my primary form of forward motion. en Copyright 2008 Macrobyte Conversant 1.0 terrywfrazier@gmail.com terrywfrazier@gmail.com Userland Radio http://www.terryfrazier.com/fullthread$1163 Thu, 01 May 2003 19:58:47 GMT terrywfrazier@gmail.com http://www.terryfrazier.com/weblog/index/channel/userlandradio/2003/05/01#item1163 http://www.terryfrazier.com/fullthread$1163 RSS Technology Userland Radio I've been messing around with my RSS feeds for a while, testing the ability of <a href="http://www.markpasc.org/code/radio/stapler/">Stapler</a> to create multiple feeds with different parameters. You will notice some new icons over on the right that link to a truncated feed (first paragraph) and a headline-only feed. <br /><br /> It works pretty well and Stapler does a good job, but this is a less-than-optimal solution. IMO the aggregator should filter feeds the way a user wants to see them, rather than me having to provide multiple feeds. The RSS reader ought to be configurable to the point that it shows as much, or as little, of the feed as wanted. <br /><br /> The other thing that would be nice is an option for a &quot;summary&quot; of an item to be specifically called out. This would be especially valuable for longer posts. It's a technique John Udell uses pretty often. It's also supported in Conversant, though I'm not sure how it works within the RSS files. <br /><br /> Ideally, the summary text would be an RSS module that would be read if present, ignored otherwise. And the aggregator could be set to display the summary in full (if present), or display some truncated version of the full post otherwise. <br /><br /> I see the summary being used by folks who usually create longer, essay-style posts or by publications that want to syndicate full articles with a summary attached. Maybe something like this already exists. I'd like to know.