Feed Readers can just truncate full text feeds if skimming is desired (which is orthogonal to river of news btw). That's how Google Reader works -- you can look at headlines and first few words of description in river of news headline mode. Then click an item to see the full included text. (Or you can switch to "extended" view, still river of news, and see full text of everything by default)
Seems best to encourage content publishers to do full feeds and leave the tools to trim it for the users.
optionshiftk
· 1 year ago
Let's face it, truncating the feeds is a bit janky and is not nearly as intelligent as a handcrafted summarization.
ryantate
· 1 year ago
99% of people don't care if they're reading an excerpt or a "hand-crafted" summation, imho. Granted they're not the same but you're just trying to decide whether to click through. And offering multiple feeds is just too confusing for an everyday non geek.
And if you really care, as a publisher, you could always do an atom feed, which can have a summary _and_ fulltext. But it's much better to have one feed. One less meaningless decision for people to make -- just click the autodiscovered RSS feed tag and you're off.
optionshiftk
· 1 year ago
Claiming that multiple feeds would be "too confusing" makes it sound like the reader is not clever enough to sort out the feeds on his or her own without mayhem. I tend to expect the utmost intelligence out of readers who were the ones who willing subscribed to the feed to begin with. Let people choose what they want.
ryantate
· 1 year ago
Nah, I'm a fascist! ;->
ryantate
· 1 year ago
PS and the reader isn't clever enough. And doesn't care! Well, mine at least. Technical blogs, maybe not.
optionshiftk
· 1 year ago
I always feel deceived when RSS feeds are not full text. I like my stuff compartmentalized and not open in a huge number of tabs, which is what happens with partial text RSS feeds.
alexandrosM
· 1 year ago
My issue is, I like full content feeds and wish more publishers would do it. If i understand correctly, your problem is not the full content itself but rather that the metadata for a summary is no longer available. Come to think of it, there is no reason there could not be a 'summary feed' and a 'full content feed' by each publisher, solving everyone's problem. It would be good if the feed format could make us both happy with a single feed but lacking that, a dual feed model could work.
Tom
· 1 year ago
This is good. I got rid of my Guardian feeds because they weren't full text. Personally I find one sentence woefully insufficient in a RSS feed. But a choice between the two is certainly the best.
Tom
· 1 year ago
Atom has a summary and an content element, giving you choice. The RSS community tried to do something similar with summary in description and the full text in content:encoded.
Rolf Schewe
· 1 year ago
I would like for all my RSS feeds to have the full text available to me.
My problem with short listings is context. Many feeds I have unsubscribed from were just headlines or only links to an article i.e. a redirect. This defeats the purpose of subscribing to that feed at all. At a minimum a feed should have the heading and around two sentences to give context to the content of the particular post, but I prefer the full text.
Feed readers such as Google Reader will crop each post if they go beyond a certain length and give you the option to click on the post to expand it to it's full length. So I think that is enough to cover any aesthetic issues some may have regarding post lengths while skimming through their feeds.
This has more to do with business models than anything else. The sites that offer very little in their feeds are most likely aiming to get you to navigate to their page and be exposed to the ad-rich environment on their actual website. I would personally prefer small unobtrusive ads in the feeds I read over having to navigate to another page.
I don't know what the argument would be against full text in all RSS feeds. Feed readers can modify them on the user end.
mattmcalister
· 1 year ago
In my mind, the best case scenario would be that publishers everywhere make full content available via RSS and that the tools would offer more customization features, such as the ability to adjust the length of the posts to whatever suits you. Safari does this.
We are getting some requests to offer both, in fact, so we may do that. But in principle I think the Internet will be a better service to people if publishers make more content available.
Tom
· 1 year ago
You'll have to excuse the self-promotion, but folks reading this thread might be interested in the partial-to-full conversion tool that I built:
Since then I've struck upon an alternate algorithm (not yet implemented, I'm afraid) that should perform even better.
The point, aside from presenting a useful tool: extracting full-text is a solvable technical problem -- it can be automated. It's therefore a bit silly for feed providers to try to oppose it (although one can hardly blame them given the feed readers' slowness to implement this feature). Doing so will ultimately just force users to extract the full text themselves, which is easy but a waste of network and computational resources. Better to simply offer the full feed from the start and give yourself the ability to place ads within it.
keyvan
· 6 months ago
I've been working on a free software project to transform feeds into full-text feeds. If anyone's interested: http://fivefilters.org/content-only/
All Comments
Seems best to encourage content publishers to do full feeds and leave the tools to trim it for the users.
And if you really care, as a publisher, you could always do an atom feed, which can have a summary _and_ fulltext. But it's much better to have one feed. One less meaningless decision for people to make -- just click the autodiscovered RSS feed tag and you're off.
My problem with short listings is context. Many feeds I have unsubscribed from were just headlines or only links to an article i.e. a redirect. This defeats the purpose of subscribing to that feed at all. At a minimum a feed should have the heading and around two sentences to give context to the content of the particular post, but I prefer the full text.
Feed readers such as Google Reader will crop each post if they go beyond a certain length and give you the option to click on the post to expand it to it's full length. So I think that is enough to cover any aesthetic issues some may have regarding post lengths while skimming through their feeds.
This has more to do with business models than anything else. The sites that offer very little in their feeds are most likely aiming to get you to navigate to their page and be exposed to the ad-rich environment on their actual website. I would personally prefer small unobtrusive ads in the feeds I read over having to navigate to another page.
I don't know what the argument would be against full text in all RSS feeds. Feed readers can modify them on the user end.
We are getting some requests to offer both, in fact, so we may do that. But in principle I think the Internet will be a better service to people if publishers make more content available.
http://labs.echoditto.com/fulltextrss
Since then I've struck upon an alternate algorithm (not yet implemented, I'm afraid) that should perform even better.
The point, aside from presenting a useful tool: extracting full-text is a solvable technical problem -- it can be automated. It's therefore a bit silly for feed providers to try to oppose it (although one can hardly blame them given the feed readers' slowness to implement this feature). Doing so will ultimately just force users to extract the full text themselves, which is easy but a waste of network and computational resources. Better to simply offer the full feed from the start and give yourself the ability to place ads within it.
http://fivefilters.org/content-only/