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For people who use RSS.

Which do you prefer:

#RSS #Blog #WebDev

  • Full-text feeds (i.e. full text of posts) (80%, 456 votes)
  • Summary text only (i.e. a snippet;) (19%, 110 votes)
566 voters. Poll end: 2 months ago

in reply to Neil Brown

Though I must say that has changed. In the early days of #rss I preferred fullfeed.

I'm not sure why it changed. The post has me thinking about that.

#RSS
in reply to Neil Brown

Actually both… a list with summaries, a click and the full article.
in reply to Neil Brown

Kotaku is one of the feeds I follow and, honestly, the website is nearly unusable. You know the kind: video ad on top, banner ad on the bottom, teeny-tiny close buttons on the ads that require laser precision to close, only 40% of the screen readable, constant lazy loading of more ads in the content that lose your place by jumping the scroll around… Truly awful.

Full text feeds would make the content bearable. (Alas not available for Kotaku.)

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Daniel 🏳️‍🌈 Jilg
i like full text way more but the TelemetryDeck blog has so many custom elements that I can’t translate into pure text, so the feed is just the first paragraph and a „read more“ link.
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Eric Kolb
I’m using Inoreader, but I’ll see if there’s a comparable option. Thanks for the tip!
in reply to Neil Brown

Generally full text unless it has footnotes, figures that don't make it into the rss feed or it's just really long.
in reply to Neil Brown

@Neil Brown I want to read in my reader, so full text

unless of course, it's a webcomic or something where the text isn't the purpose

in reply to silverwizard

@silverwizard What about podcasts with show notes etc? In your feed or click through?
in reply to Neil Brown

I would like to know how to use it ... But am too afraid to ask
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DamonHD
@silverwizard Thank you. But would you want full accompanying text visible in your reader too, ie beyond title and snippets?
in reply to DamonHD

@silverwizard (Basically I'd like to ask your question again about podcasts, which I am today writing a paper on the (in)efficiency of feed handling for!)
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@Neil Brown @DamonHD the main reason I want it in the main feed is that the deaf shouldn't have to look for a special feed

DamonHD reshared this.

in reply to Neil Brown

I am way more likely to not bother reading something, if it forces me to exit the comfortable feed reader environment. I use miniflux, and I just don't like to leave that interface.
in reply to silverwizard

@silverwizard I feel far more confident with getting accessibility (a11y) right in a full spec-conformant browser than whatever each RSS reader is. (I put a fair amount of effort into a11y, though don't know if I am doing it right or not!)
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gabriel

to add a feed to my website.

Context, I have a website using Hugo, which allows me to write in markdown; because I don't want to learn css Java or anything of that sort.

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gabriel

🤔

It may be the case.

Or maybe depends on the configuration.

This is my website:

gavox.srht.site/

This entry was edited (2 months ago)
in reply to Neil Brown

Summary and a website that returns proper results for requests of text/plain. Otherwise full-text.
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Clare Hooley
@gabriel not all Hugo blogs have full text RSS though - the theme I use only does a snippet. Although the same theme has actually been updated now and does do full text feeds, given I have e.g. added some image galleries driven by JavaScript, I haven’t looked at merging that back in, as I’m just more confident of what people will see if they go to a browser.
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in reply to DamonHD

@DamonHD @silverwizard Show notes and chapters and such are fully supported by many podcast apps, so I'd want them in the RSS feed. Not AI-generated ones though. One podcast I follow uses (slightly edited) auto-chapters and they are complete garbage.
in reply to Neil Brown

It's unfortunate that RSS doesn't seem to provide a way to specify both a full version and a summarized version. Clients can do something like show only the first paragraph (giving users control over whether they want to read full posts or just a bit), which seems like the best of both worlds, but it means that authors can't control the summary. A hybrid approach might be for clients to fetch OpenGraph data from the source link itself as a summary.

rssboard.org/rss-specification…

in reply to Neil Brown

I was a little bit surprised at how many prefer to get what I consider an incomplete body (in my use case for blog subscription). But there are different use cases.

Also a reason why a short summary may be preferred: Some blogs include so much unnecessary HTML in the description field, with "related content" and stuff like that. In that case I'd prefer a short text summary or cut-off first paragraph to let me decide whether I want to load the full page.

in reply to Neil Brown

I would love it if the standard allowed for a link which clients could use to download the full text (and safe HTML), allowing you to keep it out of the feed to keep it small.

Aggregators could pre-fill the content if they wanted.

I’m all in favour of full-text but some feeds are gigantic, and crawlers are almost never polite (as rachelbythebay demonstrated recently).

in reply to Neil Brown

I prefer Atom as it has both <summary> and <content> rather than just <description>
It also has a way to include HTML without guesswork
in reply to Neil Brown

it has always boggled me why most RSS feeds offer just a summary with a link to the "full version". Why can't they just have all the content in the RSS feed article?

If they're going to the length of offering RSS anyway, why not instead of just teasing those who obviously prefer RSS over other means, give them everything. It must be more effort to give just a summary than to have the content already made, available in the RSS also.