I recently tried out an RSS aggregator extension for my browser, and I have to say, I’m not really impressed so far. It *works*, but I find the following a bit annoying:
1) Inconsistent context. Some sites put the whole damn article in the RSS entries, some only put the first ‘x’ number of words.
2) Lack of comment information. Often I’m interested in seeing any new comments on older entries, but the RSS file doesn’t even tell me how many comments there are so I can’t tell if there are any new ones
3) Inconsistent HTML usage. Some sites put HTML within the RSS entry, but some don’t, which is important on sites where things like accompanying images are important to the entry.
As a result I usually wind up visiting the site manually anyway to get the proper layout, images, comments, etc., so checking in the RSS aggregator first didn’t really do any good.
I can see one area in which RSS would be quite useful, when you want to check large numbers of infrequently-updated sites for new entries without having to visit every single one. It just doesn’t do much to help me out. It sounds great in theory, so maybe it’s just the implementations and usage of it that’s not up to snuff yet.
I use an RSS feed too for all my news sites, and a lot of them don’t put the whole article in the feed. Kind of sucks. You end up having to go to the site anyway, but it really depends on who you subscribe to. I know Matt reads a bunch that show graphics, the whole article, etc.
I prefer feeds that contain full posts, images and all. Will Movable Type allow you to make changes to your feed? I can’t stand the MT implementation.
Comments have been a big problem. Lately, the favored solution has been to create a comments feed. I’ve seen a site or two with other solutions, such as a feed for each post or putting the comments in with the post.
HTML usage is inconsistent because the specs aren’t very clear on how to do it. Some poeple think it should be escaped in the XML. Some think it should be unescaped. Some think it shouldn’t be there at all. I treat mine as CDATA.
Even with all its warts, however, I find RSS to be invaluable.
Ah well, I guess I’m just not the heavy user it’s probably meant for. :-)
The RSS generated by MT can be customized a bit; it’s generated from a template file where MT-specific elements are filled in by the engine as it’s parsed. I just had it using the default template, but I think I’ve tweaked it enough to show the entire article body and include HTML now. It *should* be possible to do a separate feed for recent comments similar to the front page, but I’ll have to experiment…