Rand Wacker

Last week I bought NetNewsWire, the undisputed king of OSX RSS readers. This basically means that it goes out and downloads an XML feed of my favorite blogs and displays them in an easy-to-surf three pane format that makes it manageable to track a large number of blogs every day (right now only 30 or 40, but I can see that growing to over 100 quite quickly). NetNewsWire was actually one of the killer apps which made me want to get a Mac, and it is really a well done tool. (For a hilarious review of NNW itself check out Rands’ page (different Rand).

The achilles heel of NNW though is that its usefulness is proportional to the quality of the RSS feeds you subscribe to. Even though RSS is used by a large number of people as a structured format to publish meme-sized chunks of information, it’s standard was originally conceived as a way to publish pointers to stories, so the payload is wrapped up in what’s mean to be an “description” field. So by default, most RSS feeds include only a very small chunk of a story (usually 40 words or 500 characters), and this makes aggregators like NetNewsWire useful only to track when someone’s put up a new post, and then you still have to click on the link, wait for your browser to load it, and finally you get to see the article. If I wanted to do this I’d just continue to use Mozilla bookmarks and keep track of what stories are new in my head.

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about. Notice that the entry just…

I’m not the first one to complain about this:

• Plasticbag complains about excerpt-only feeds and brings up many other good points about how to make RSS more useful. This article says everything I was thinking, and more.
• Dan points out a couple of good RSS 2.0 templates people can use.

So, what can you do?

There are a couple of easy fixes. Most MT blogs created before 2.64 start with a default RSS 0.91 template (written out as index.xml). You can edit that template and simply change the line:

<description><$MTEntryExcerpt encode_xml="1"$></description>

to use MTEntryBody and MTEntryMore instead of MTEntryExcerpt:

<description><$MTEntryBody encode_xml="1"$><$MTEntryMore encode_xml="1"$></description>

Note that this is a bit of a kludge and overloads the description field with the entire entry. In RSS 0.91/0.92 this appears to be the only way to get the full payload in however.

UPDATED: A better option is to drop in a new RSS 2.0 template and link it from your main page. Mark has a stylish RSS 2.0 template with both excepts in the description field and full bodies in the content:encoded field.

I’ve made one minor MT-specific change to this template so that in case I created a really extended entry (like this post has), it will put a “Continue reading…” link at the bottom. To do this just replace the <content:encoded> section to the following (sorry for the bad wrapping):

<content:encoded><![CDATA[<$MTEntryBody$><MTEntryIfExtended><a href="<$MTEntryPermalink$>#more">Continue reading "<$MTEntryTitle$>"</a><br /></MTEntryIfExtended>]]></content:encoded>

And I can definitly understand if people don’t want to publish full stories in their RSS feed, as some people see content and presentation as inexorably linked, but even the most presentation-aware folks have gotten over that.

There are some discussions about this on the Moveable Type support forums here
and here.

The RSS validator has some tips for MT users as well.