phil ringnalda

For something close to a year and a half now, I’ve been putting a hand-written summary into my RSS <description> elements, and the full content of the item in <content:encoded>. I really think that’s the right thing to do, using <description> as it was originally intended, and offering the feed consumer a choice of which to use. Sadly, it really hasn’t been a choice for most: if you write your own aggregator or syndication code, you can choose, but for most people you just get whatever the author of your reader chose: <content:encoded> if you are lucky, just a short summary if you aren’t.

Now, finally, at last, you get to choose: Bloglines just added a pair of preferences, one for your default choice for all feeds, and another for each feed, which over-rides the all feeds preference. If you mostly want full items, but want just summaries from one or two feeds that go on and on and on about things you rarely want to read, you can have just that. If you mostly want summaries, with just a few feeds where you want to see every word, you can have that. If you want to scan at top speed, you can choose just titles, that exand to full items when you click them. Choice is a wonderful thing. Now all we need to do is make sure everyone producing a feed offers you the choice as well…