When I moved sooz.com over to WordPress from Movable Type I decided to only show summaries in the RSS feed instead of full text. My reasoning for this is because I preferred someone to view the full entry at it’s archived location on my website. There are websites such as Frassle that republish a website’s content based on its RSS feed and also include a commenting system for each republished item. I like Frassle and think that overall, it’s rather revolutionary, but I do not like the way it handles republishing someone else’s content. If I had a say in the matter, I’d want web-based aggregators that republish a site’s content to use a summary RSS feed and stand-alone applications such as News Fire or NetNewsWire could use the full text RSS feed. Presently there doesn’t seem to be an easy way to facilitate this request.
Right now there isn’t a lot to the aesthetics of sooz.com while it’s using one of the WordPress design templates, but there is certainly more to this site than the content you’ll see in the RSS feed. Check out the sidebar on the right to see what I mean.
Interestingly enough, after writing up this entry I checked in on sooz.com’s republished content on Frassle and it looks like Frassle stopped republishing it on March 29, 2005. Are they no longer republishing weblogs? Maybe Shimon (Frassle co-developer) can shed some light. If they’ve changed their policy then this entry may no longer apply to them. :)
Comments
3 responses to “RSS Syndication Etiquette or Type-A Blogger Syndrome?”
Actually, when you follow an archive link to your site, you don’t see the sidebar. That’s the way my MT blog works too (when I bother to post to it, that is, which isn’t very often these days ;-( )
I never really gave it much thought, but I guess you can configure archives to look more like the front page, which might be interesting with more folks arriving via RSS these days.
Since I got the new Safari I find I don’t visit blog homepages very much anymore. Some of them unfortunately take a long time to load. Pity, I guess, when some people put so much work into their design ….
I recently moved sooz.com over to WordPress and haven’t finished tinkering with the templates. For now the sidebar is only on the homepage but it’ll be on all the pages eventually. :)
Frassle’s aggregator has been disabled for a while due to some bugs. I have been focusing on other projects, but when I get back to frassle this is at the top of my list of things to fix. So the criticism does apply.
One thing I could do is not show links to aggregated blogs except for people who are looking at it via the aggregator. This would make frassle more like a desktop aggregator, in that content wouldn’t just be republished out in the open. Also, frassle’s comment system is more like a “blog this” rather than attaching a comment; any comment you make in frassle goes on your frassle blog and is automatically threaded as a response.