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July 17, 2002

Going back to an untruncated RSS feed

After championing truncating your RSS feed to the first paragraph, I'm going back to an untruncated RSS feed. Truncation works very well if you write like a reporter. If you get everything important into that first paragraph, folks can decide if they want to click further. But sometimes I feel more like telling stories than reporting the news. And in that case, it's very hard to get everything you want to say into that first 'graph.

This was brought home to me this week. I put in an item about the emotional risk you take when you decide to share your blog/klog with others. The first 'graph was very short, but at least one person took the trouble to read further, and found something of value in the next to last paragraph.

If I had a choice, I suppose I'd like a mechanism that would let me specify whether or not to abridge my blog entry into something shorter for my RSS feed. But since part of the point of this weblog is offer things that others might be interested in, I'll try sending out an unfiltered feed again.