Full-text RSS/Atom feeds are a good thing

Dennis Kennedy has another good post on weblogging. In this one he offers observations about weblogging from the perspective of one who reads a large volume of weblog content using newsreader software.

Dennis continues to stress the importance of offering full-text RSS feeds so that readers don't have to click through to see the whole post. One of his earlier posts made me decide to do just that. From the reader's point of view, I'm finding full-text feeds awfully important myself, because I also read a lot of feeds (though nowhere near the 600+ that Dennis describes). I had to edit my three MovableType feed templates to make the change properly on my own weblog, but it was relatively easy with a little help from the Template Tags section of the manual.

There are a lot of weblogs, legal and otherwise, whose authors still haven't gone to full-text feeds. Why not? Most of them don't have advertising for which they need viewers. Is it just because many weblogs have excerpt feeds on by default? That can be changed easily enough. If you want tips on editing preferences and templates in Movable Type, let me know and I'll be glad to share my templates and MT settings.

If you're worried that some people might want only an excerpt feed of your weblog, you might take the approach Denise Howell used. Her weblog offers both full-text and excerpt feeds. I haven't tried to set that up in MovableType, but one could do it by making duplicate feed templates and tweaking the tags.