A lot of nerds are talking about RSS feeds right now (okay, non-nerds: sites that you like visiting can be delivered to a single place, all together-one that is either browser-based, like Google Reader, or application-based, where you open it up and all your websites are just hangin' out there) and whether they should be "full" or "truncated." Recently, one rather large blog site called Gawker moved from a full RSS feed to a truncated one, and this is very upsetting to these people who care about such things and I love watching them rumble. (One person predicts that such a change has to do with cleaning up Gawker and making it a mega-news site; but then no one really understands why Gawker's owner Nick Denton does what he does.) The good news out of all of this is this fun stat of the day: "after the Guardian moved to full RSS feeds in late 2008, its web traffic grew dramatically, from 25 million to 37 million monthly uniques." If you'd like to learn more, go for it. Nerd.
Thursday, March 11, 2010
31
Gawker Marketing Manager @turnipsun is tweeting you can do
http://feeds.gawker.com/[sitename]/vip
to get the full feeds for all their sites. Replace with gizmodo, lifehacker, io9, etc.
Wait, Gawker has a Marketing Manager?
Any truncated feeds I just remove from my aggregator. Problem solved.
I removed Gawker from my aggregator over a year ago. Problem never even realized.
Same, semi-regretfully.
Oh, that was @cieca; @jolie: same, without regrets
It looks like Gawker's doing what some other blog "networks" (Buzz, Uproxx) are doing. And it's annoying. (Nerd!)
(For the record, I read The Awl both on the main site and through RSS.)
Same. I don't think I would have a problem with Gawker or any site sending truncated feeds, except so many of them do this snarky first paragraph thing that gives no information about the content of the article. Sometimes that's good and I'm intrigued and click through but most of the time I'm just annoyed.
How does this affect my porn consumption?
Oddly enough, the very Q you posed will be addressed in my upcoming novel, How Nick Ticks, which, I assure you, is truncated indeed.
Funny. The Awl has a full feed, but the comments are so value-added (a.k.a. fucking awesome and hilarious) that I click through more than any other website.
In general, I prefer sites like Gawker to have truncated feeds, because it makes it easier to skip through the 99% of pieces I don't want to read, and just open the rest in new tabs.
This generally applies to any sites that have dozens of posts per day.
quantity; quality, etc.
SAME HERE. The Awl is probably the ONLY site I actually read regularly outside the safe space of my Google Reader. It's for the tags and for the comments.
That said, the Gawker thing pissed me off, and I'm saying this as a blogger at a site that has a fucking truncated feed, which I keep meaning to bring up and have changed, yet always forget.
Yes! sometimes I like the comments better than the posts!
The Awl missed a chance to provide a discursive treatment on the enstupiding of the Internet. As Mr. SICHA has previously written, your Twitter "stream"Â is not your RSS feed, but that's the delusion people are under these days. Said delusion has harmed everything that relies on RSS save for podcasts, which by definition cannot exist without them.
As an example, ask any longtime Flickr user how their stats are these days compared to three years ago. The standard answer is one-tenth.
I prefer to read my websites as a series of 1's and 0's on my stock ticker.
0010101100110001
I agree.
Is that a picture of some new chillwave band I should be aware of?
Oh you crazy kids with your Tweeterness and your SS feeds, just go outside and play for once!
I curse the sun, and all that grows under it.
But it buuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuurns!
I receive the Awl directly via the chip hidden under the filling of my upper left second molar.
There is only one site with a truncated feed that I will deign to subscribe to.
God, this is too nerdy even for me!
Backdoor: if you append 'vip.xml' to the RSS feed URL (as in gawker.com/vip.xml) you get the full feeds again. Works for all their sites (like lifehacker.com/vip.xml, yes I am a nerd).
That really looks like Scrunchington. Connoisseur of quirky things that look like art, social mediaite, bipedlar, and Bon Vivant, he is much more than a "geek": he is an onophile and a wank. Wonk?
I don't care what anyone says. RSS feeds are the bomb-dot-com. They filter out the garbage and look legit at work!
I was so bummed when my boss figured out what my feed reader looked like, and what it was doing to my productivity...
His use of the phrase "our broader ambition" has me trembling.
SAIC demands full feeds.