There has been a bit of discussion in the Blaugust community about the importance and nature of RSS feeds for bloggers. Roger at Contains Moderate Peril had his say, and so did Fyr over at Fyr.io.
There is a general consensus amongst the folks who commented in the Blaugust discord that RSS feeds are a general good if not an outright necessity for a blog. But there was some healthy debate about the contents of those RSS feeds: I want to capture my own opinion here so I have something more accessible than Discord to refer back to.
What is an RSS feed?
RSS is an acronym that stands for “Really Simply Syndication” plus several other alternative but related meanings. The basic original idea of RSS was to provide a consumer of the RSS feed with a machine-readable file that could summarize a site’s content, listing entries by date with basic descriptive information to allow the full content to be retrieved upon request. As shorthand, most sites provide their main RSS feed at a common URL like https://<somesite>/rss or /feed- you can try this with my site to see what raw RSS looks like. Note that my site redirects /rss to /feed in case that is confusing to you.
The idea was that a program on a user’s computer or a web based app on a website could parse such a feed and, along with other RSS feeds, present a customized view for consuming new content. The RSS readers became known as news readers and for a while were quite common. Programs and websites like Netnewswire, Feedly, and Inoreader persist to this day, along with a few newcomers like FreshRSS.
My opinion on feed content
My opinion is that every blog should have an RSS feed. It seems critical to the concept of community sharing and the idea of expanding the reach of blogs beyond “Just me”. It is also quite simply the consumer friendly thing to do. A news reader with ready access to RSS feeds allows the audience of the blog to combine the feeds of several blogs and news sources into their own custom view of what is interesting to them.
I am, of course, biased. I use a news reader myself and follow a couple dozen news feeds. These range in content from the BBC to individual bloggers and cover both general news sources and highly specific topics like computer role playing games. My news is customized to my interests, and I like it that way.
Apparently, however, there are some bloggers who despise RSS. The summaries RSS provides, in their opinion, distract the viewer from seeing their blog in its native state. People might not see their particular stylistic choices and presentation wizardry in its correct form if all they view is an RSS feed.
I can understand this point of view despite disagreeing with it. I have a softer version of the same perspective in the fact that I do not include the full text of my blog posts in my RSS feeds. Instead I provide just a title and a summary plus a header image and tags to help someone find content on my site that interests them. But I hope and expect the people who want to view my site to come and view it directly.
I understand the argument for providing a full post text rss feed. It ensures that someone can use a feed reader “natively” and never view my site. They can download the full content of my blog posts and read them later while they are offline. I can see where these things could be a benefit for some use cases, and I don’t want to exclude people from my blog for spurious reasons.
But I do want people to see and interact with my blog natively. I want them to enjoy the images in my posts, to see the formatting, and to comment on and like what I have written. I want to know via view statistics that my blog is being accessed and that I actually have some kind of audience to reach out to. These things all require that the audience view my site ‘natively’ in their browser and, for now at least, I will remain in the “title and summary” camp of RSS feed providers.
I understand that some RSS feed readers can combine the best of both worlds, using the summary data to download full text for offline viewing. I hope this is an adequate compromise for the people who prefer “feed reader native / offline viewing” of my blog posts. And I will continue contemplating the idea of enabling full text in my feed in a future iteration based on measured and rational discussions I read and news articles I peruse on the topic.
UPDATE: A false thesis about full text
Apparently I changed all three of my blogs to produce full text RSS feeds at some point in the past. I don’t recall doing this, but the setting is clearly there:
So my whole thesis regarding full text versus excerpts was based on a false assumption. I’m going to leave my RSS feeds set to full text for now and just hang my head in shame. Thanks to Juhis in the comments for pointing this out!
The header image for this post is AI generated using ChatGPT
It’s a control issue, isn’t it? Everyone ought to be able to make up their own mind about it and leave others to do the same. I don’t choose to promote my blog anywhere because I don’t care if anyone reads it. If someone else doesn’t want RSS users to read their blogs, fine. That’s their decision. You just have to accept that the fewer channels you choose to accept, the fewer people will find your blog. If you’re happy with that, great. If not, use the channels.
We had all this last year with comments and I changed my viewpoint after a while. First, I thought a blog without a comment section wasn’t fit to call itself a blog at all but after the debate I realised all it really means is that a blog without a comment section is one I have no interest in reading. I don’t read blogs that don’t accept comments any more and I’m more than happy to extend that same courtesy to blogs without RSS feeds.
I wholly agree with both of you: I wish every blog had RSS because otherwise they will fall through the cracks for me but essentially everyone makes their own decisions and there shouldn’t be any gatekeeping for whether a blog needs to have one.
Personally, I aim to keep advocating for RSS but trying to maintain a non-judgemental tone.
I’m bit confused by this since your feed already has full text, right? Is there something that for some posts that you snip out and only provide a snippet?
That is an excellent question. I’m on WordPress (self-hosted), and I understand that the default behaviour is to provide only a title and extract. But when I look at the raw RSS feed today I see what looks to be full text. So… maybe the default has changed or I’ve done something that breaks the default.
No matter: if it is full text already I won’t struggle to hard to ‘fix’ it. It might explain why I get so little traffic however.