so rand pointed out that by default MT creates RSS feeds that essentially chop the message body of entries into an excerpt of the story… blah blah annoying yes I agree.. and my initial reaction was to simply make the changes to feed the entire story as well.

after putting a bit more thought into this I realized that it doesn’t actually make as much sense as I initially thought. Without going into too much detail, what Rand proposes is to change the <description> section to include more text. but just think about it for a moment… we’re increasing the description???

lets use cnet as an example. in a given day, if they included the full body for all articles in every rss feed.. that would be a pretty fat feed that would be pulled down everytime a user’s aggregator simply polled for new content! to combat this they would have to do something harsh, like only provide the most recently few articles.
so thinking about how I would ideally do it… there would still be a very limited <description> section. then there would be of course a <link> that points to the full version of the entry. now what if I were an organization such as CNET? my <link> would lead to a relatively large chunk of content, complete with style sheets, fat html, some images, way too much CRAP. so to combat this i would also include a &lttextlink&gt that would be a URL but to a light version of the message body.

why? i think it’s the job of the aggregator to pull the correct content. the user should tell his aggregator whether to only display excerpts (which often will be enough for the full body), fat content (with images), or the light content. if the user will be pulling the content to then carry on another device or to even republish, the light content would be ideal.

of course this would require a change to the RSS spec. so for now i agree with brian’s approach, which is to create two different feeds. a light and a heavy.

as much as i agree with randal, i think it’s a bad idea to just blast content in the <description> field. i’ll use brian’s compromise solution… and remain open to some mental kung-fu over the matter later.