Following Dean Allen’s lead, I have changed my RSS feeds to include only a title and brief description, with a link to read the rest of the post. This description is not auto-generated; I hand-write a specific description for each post. (For those using MT, it’s stored in the excerpt
field, and accessed via the <$MTEntryExcerpt$> tag.)
This is a sudden change; previously, Radio users got titles only, and users of other news aggregators got full posts. Both groups may be unhappy with the change, and I am willing to be convinced that this is a step backwards from either direction. I am also aware that I am not the first person to grapple with this issue.
This is an admission that reading in a news aggregator is fundamentally different than reading individual sites in a web browser. I don’t use my aggregator to read things; I use it to find things to read. I tried the whole read everything in your aggregator
thing, and it depresses me. It reminds me of when I used to smoke, and everything tasted the same.
This is also my first admission that I use an aggregator at all. For the past few days, I have been experimenting with a homegrown Python script that aggregates RSS feeds, converts the descriptions to plain text, and emails the results to me. My inbox is my aggregator. This is mostly so I can keep up with my daily reading while I’m on the road.
For those who care about that sort of thing, the feed includes a word count of each post. This is accomplished with Adam Kalsey’s word count plugin for Movable Type. I am aware that the word count is not terribly accurate, probably because it is not stripping HTML tags before counting, so it counts words in alt and title attributes. (Update: the plug-in now strips HTML tags before counting. Thanks, Adam.)
