Truncated RSS Feeds

July 28, 2007 in communication, internet | 3 comments

I just read an article discussing whether truncated RSS feeds are good or bad. I’m currently using truncated feeds (of course this post may be short enough to not get truncated), but if any of you have an opinion on the matter, I’d love to hear it.

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  1. Scott Moonen’s avatar

    Scott Moonen on July 29, 2007 at 6:33 am

    I prefer full feeds, as I try to do all of my reading right in my RSS reader (Google Reader). Having to jump directly to the site breaks my flow. Unless you’re serving up ads for revenue, there’s probably no reason to truncate the feed. That gives someone the choice of reading it in their reader or on your site.

    Reading my own feed in my reader alerted me to something interesting, though. If you rely heavily on CSS classes within your post body then things will degrade in an RSS reader, since the stylesheet is unavailable. I’ve taken to using style= instead of class= within body text (where necessary) to workaround this.

  2. Jordan Liggitt’s avatar

    Jordan Liggitt on July 29, 2007 at 3:12 pm

    I prefer full feeds (and use them on my site). I can only see three downsides to providing full feeds.

    1) Loss of advertising revenue, if your site had ads and your feed didn’t.

    2) Bandwidth, which usually isn’t that different between post excerpts and full posts.

    3) A loss of involvement with the rest of the site. Most likely, the people who are subscribed to your feed probably don’t need to navigate around the rest of the blog much (since they’re up to date with previous posts).

  3. Brian Adkins’s avatar

    Brian Adkins on July 30, 2007 at 3:38 pm

    Ok, I’ve switched to full feeds. Of course, if I ever decide to make millions with advertisements, I may need to switch back ;)