Abbreviated RSS fields

I have been giving some thought about this recently. I am going to release an optional “short-description” feature tonight that I hope everyone will use for posts longer than a sentence or two. (instead of the full post text appearing in the feed, only the short-description will appear). 

…but I personally want to see the number of page views vs. Rss feed hits even out a little more. Syndirella, Newsgator, etc are all great, but they do take away (just a little) from the community. My hope is people will read a post, make a comment or two, check out the referrals/pingbacks/trackbacks and all of the other links that float around .NET Weblogs.

Sitting back using your favorite aggreator is nice, but you are definetly missing out on the “full community” here. (NOTE: more on this later). [ScottW’s ASP.NET WebLog]

I really hope this option will be selectable by the reader rather than the blogger. One of the reasons that I am a fan of RSS based news aggregation is that it gives me the opportunity to read posts without having to visit the individual sites to read what people have written.

Often, I will do an RSS download first thing in the morning and then be able to read the posts later in the day when I might not have Internet connectivity such as on a train or working away from the office.

Of the feeds that I subscribe to, only a small handful have abbreviated feeds that give only an introduction to each post and these are the ones where I only read an occasional article. If all the feeds that I currently subscribe to from dotnetweblogs.com went this way, that would be a whole load of content from a bunch of interesting people that I wouldn’t get to read.