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bitching web 2.0

Antiquated RSS feeds (Scott Hartsman, I’m looking at you)

I found Scott’s blog the other week, and liked it.

So, I added it to my feed reader.

Now, I’m removing it, because the way he’s got his RSS setup – http://www.hartsman.com/feed – is unreadable (literally – only the first 100 words or so of each post is included, the rest is all missing).

Incidentally, this is why – after many years of using the site as a primary news source – I no longer read Gamedev.net (feed) : a site that resorts to hiding its information and news behind extra links, sacrificing usability to gain advertising money, is not one I have time for. There are plenty of people who’ll provide the info I want in an easy manner, without this jumping through hoops.

Sigh. I have a feed reader to read feeds, not to get a “free sample of your brilliance” that I then have to go to a web browser to be allowed to actually read in full…

4 replies on “Antiquated RSS feeds (Scott Hartsman, I’m looking at you)”

I’m subscribed to Scott’s feed too and don’t have this 100 word problem. Though I am subscribed to the Atom feed not RSS. Maybe there’s a difference between the two.

Now that’s one way to get someone’s attention. :)

Are you sure it’s a feed problem and not a reader problem? (And if it’s a feed problem, have any suggestions on how to fix it? Everything on my blog is stock, straight out of the distro.)

Both the RSS and Atom feeds show the whole article to me, but I’ve only ever looked at them in Sage.

– Scott

Sorry, the only check I did was to open things up in a second feed reader (firefox) to check it wasn’t *only* my reader.

But looking more carefully … My understanding: in your case (not so for gamedev.net, where I believe they deliberately keep the feed shorter than the actual page) it might be that most feed readers are imperfect, including the one built in to my web browser (try following the feed link in firefox, for instance).

The data for the entries is there, but it’s encoded twice, once as a 100 word limit tagged “description” (which is what the basic readers pick up), and a second time as the full text tagged “content:encoded” (which they do NOT pick up). At least, not with the RSS header you have…

I find the world of RSS and all its variants far too complex to ever remember which is which and what’s the latest, so I confess off the top of my head not to know whether your feed is the new way, or the old way, of tagging data. I can only say that the first two readers I tried barfed on it :).

I do know that BrokenToys has the same tagging, but a different RSS header, and the full text appears happily in the same readers that won’t render your full text :). Joy!

PS: WordPress 2.5 is out. They changed a lot. I’m not sure I like all of the changes. But, you might want to try it. I had a FAIL with the upgrade that I managed to find an easy fix for in the end, so YMMV.

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