From time to time people ask me why I foreshorten my RSS feed rather than providing the full text of the story. It's simple — I'm uncomfortable with syndication.

Call me vain, but I work hard on presentation. I want people to see my brilliant words here, with my own visual design. RSS is great to let you know when something's new but it doesn't let the author have any control over visual layout. You can't even easily include HTML tags in RSS. And fancy stuff like my carefully crafted mouseover images doesn't translate well to RSS, particularly if javascript is involved.

That's why I don't put the full entry in my RSS feed; I want you to come here in a real browser. I'm not totally happy with this restriction but I like it better than the alternative.

cultureblogs
  2003-06-08 22:16 Z