Global Reset

On principle, I have to start being more strict about unsubscribing from feeds with a truncated RSS feed. The whole point of this syndication stuff, is that I gather all of my news into a centralized location and I format it how I want it formatted. When certain bloggers only offer a truncated feed, I have to exit my feed depot to visit their website. In certain cases, I assume the site is trying to conserve bandwidth. That must be the case for sites like Cox and Forkum. I guess the bandwidth adds up quickly when the content you are distributing is primarily a large image, rather than text.

But what excuse does Diana Mertz Hsieh and Patrick Oscar Boykin have for their truncated feeds? Most of their posts are relatively short… They aren’t making advertising money off the site… It’s possible they don’t realize that a truncated RSS feed annoys some of us. I have no estimate of the size of their readership, so I guess it’s also possible that I’m the only one. Diana is an interesting character in Objectivism in that she originally sided with David Kelly (in the infamous split with ARI and Peikoff), but after serious reflection has reconsidered her position and has written a lot of good articles about what’s wrong with The Objectivist Center (in practice and in principal). I believe that her well-written articles do net her a large audience. Patrick is a friend from Georgia Tech. We were meant to be roommates, but he kicked me out of my own dorm room to squeeze a friend of his in. Consequently, we became very good friends. A couple of his publications on social networks have been recently slashdot‘ed, so it stands to reason that his audience has to be more than a handful of readers.

I wonder if there is a service out there that parses popular blog layouts (wordpress, blogger, etc) and ”screen-scrapes” the full blog post into a full RSS feed? Do truncated RSS feeds bother you also? If you aren’t using RSS yet, check out BlogLines for a good example of “RSS made easy.” You can start with my blogroll as a quick intro.

Update: No thanks to my petty complaints, Diana’s RSS feed is no longer truncated. I no longer find her blog, in any way, inadequate. :) Though I did learn that bandwidth is a concern. Those of you using an RSS client would probably be doing all of your favorite blogs a solid if you toned down the polling rate. A couple of times a day should be more than adequate for anything but a “breaking news” blog.