There’s a debate raging on the use of RSS - either full-text or partial-text feeds. I’m going to talk about my games news website news0r.com, and compare it to this site, my personal weblog.

On news0r, there is a partial RSS feed of the last 20 or so stories posted. The decision to make this feed only a partial feed was a deliberate one, as the decision to use RSS is not one that relates to delivering content through this channel. The use of RSS on news0r is about making people aware that new content is available.

But the end point is not to deliver discrete blocks of content to our customers through this channel. After all, of the 30-odd categories we currently support on the site, the RSS feed only displays about 10. We don’t want people to read the news via RSS, we want them to come to the website and enjoy the other information we post as well (reviews, previews, screenshot galleries, feature articles, gamer columns and so on). By not relying on RSS as the delivery channel, we can also cross-link items, embed images, run features on the website. The information becomes permanent rather than transient.

The feeds we use to create the i-mode and web’n'walk sites are also only partial feeds, but this time for a different reason. These feeds drive sites that are aimed at mobile devices which may or may not have enough memory to display the full feed, so we deliberately use partial feeds so we can show more information to the viewer - more than just a bland headline (which need to be short for the aggregation services we also feed), and less than the full story - some of which are too large to be displayed on their own on some handsets.

This site however is a different animal. This site is a discussion site, it’s where I talk about what I’m doing and where I can put forward some of my thoughts and opinions. So it’s better that the RSS feed I provide be full text. And so it is (although admittedly at the beginning it wasn’t, as I hadn’t found the switch in the RSS output options that enabled full text…)

Technorati Tags: news0r, Games, Games News, RSS, RSS Feeds