peter, the reason i used partials to begin with is, firstly, that i like nice design and i got the site the way i wanted it to look…i wanted that to be on display, rather than vanilla text in a reader. in some ways rss has killed off good design on the web and that’s a bit sad.

the other reason is f*$%@# scraper blogs stealing content from full feeds. but that’s just a hazard of this environment, there are ways to deal with it, and if the majority of readers want full feeds i’m prepared to put up with this particular annoyance.

I think this is a positive move, since even people like me will come to the site to read an article if it appears particularly long or has images / media content that we think might be formatted better on the page than in the reader. With the way Ballardian is structured now, too, I sometimes (perhaps once every week or two) visit the main page anyway, just to see what’s going on. If you have an interesting blog, full text feeds are no threat, since interested readers will always pop back to the site every now and then.

The change the Simon has made is so that the RSS feed contains the full text of each new story he posts, rather than just the first few hundred characters.

Being a bit of a geek, I can’t really imagine using the web without RSS now. I had RSS bandit loaded with some several hundred RSS feeds, including the various websites linked to Ballardian. Each morning when I get to work I’m alerted to which sites have updated content.