The Butt Ugly Weblog

Please, check your RSS feed length!

Grr. I like to read RSS feeds instead of the actual weblogs, since that way I can get them nicely on a single screen.

But some people like to put ALL of their blog entry text on the RSS feed. Which means that it'll take AGES for me to scroll through the text. It's even worse if they have included pictures, which tend to explode the size even more.

A good example is the RSS feed of Russell Beattie's weblog. He's a nice and smart guy, but his RSS feed is currently 16 screenfuls of text and pictures. (On my font and resolution, obviously).

JSPWiki blog limits the RSS entries to roughly 1000 characters. Some software uses the old 512 character limit from older versions of RSS. Some use just the headline, but I think it's very hard to know whether you really want to read the article or not based on the headline only - it's better to include the first paragraph or two.

This sort of echoes this earlier article. If RSS is to be the main way of distributing updates, there is something to be said about too much data as well :-).