Patrick,
I've weighed in multiple times that I think a full feed is the way to go. Multiple feeds are even better if you feel strongly that you must provide a truncated one but if you are to only have one, full is the way I'd prefer to see it go. A full feed can always be excerpted, a clipped feed can never be expanded.
A lot of the argument for clipping comes from the presumption of how the data feed is being used, such as "The full versions clog up aggregators, and defeat the purpose of being able to monitor what's going on at a glance." The whole point of RSS is that you don't know what's happening at the other end of the pipe. A lot of us use aggregators that are not intended to monitor "at a glance" but are an alternate means to read the full articles. The feed could be getting indexed, or put on a PDA, or whatever. If it's truncated it limits the utility for many of those uses.
It's your party, cry if you want to, but I just don't see the existence of this feature in NetNewsWire as a decision maker for bloggers. Who cares? It's the tail wagging the dog, dumbing yourself down because of the feature set of one client out of the gazillion clients out there. It's like writing bad HTML code to fit the rendering quirks of browsers - people do it because they think they have to at the time then the client changes the behavior and everyone is stuck doing crazy shit for no reason. You know, if you have to make an edit at the beginning of a post, it will still show up in NNW anyway. Fight the power, don't clip your feed because some biscuithead adds in a highly annoying feature most people will turn off anyway (or if they can't turn it off they'll quit using NNW.)
From my experience aggregating with FeedOnFeeds, I can tell you that blogs that make me do extra steps to even figure out what the goddamn post is about are blogs I stop reading. For me, the aggregator is not a reminder to go check out the web page, it is the way I prefer to read the posts. I have limited time for my aggregation reading, so if I can't get read it in one step directly from the FoF page the odds of coming back to it decrease rapidly. If I only have a title and a few words to go on, the odds approach zero.
I don't know if this is any closer to your needs than the other server-side aggregators, but I'm using FeedOnFeeds for my aggregation. I tried and discarded several, including NetNewsWire and have decided that FoF is closest (so far) to what I want. In the "Control Panel" view, it shows the tally of how many new articles there are in each of your group. You can either follow a link to read the stories, or follow a link to the actual blog itself. You can also import OPML with it, and by adding a Javascript "bookmarklet" to your menu or toolbar, you can add a currently viewed blog to your list via a single action.
The downside of FoF is that it is still a gearhead type project. This requires you setting it up on your own webserver, and having a database available. I originally set it up on my home Linux box, and later moved it to my hosted Rackshack box. The very nice thing about this is that I can use the same aggregator (with the same things marked as read) at home, at work, in hotel rooms. That part I really like.
Not exactly the desktop Windows aggregator you asked for, but something that I use on Windows (and OS X and Linux) and like very much.
d
Well, I do ike to do things the right way, obey standards, and generally Feel Like I'm On Track. After some of this discussion I gave it my best effort. However, when I pulled up IE and Mozilla and looked at the same CSS side by side, each of which had a number of issues that the other one didn't, I shrieked "Whoa nelly jesus in the morning, my life is too short to try this CSS on every permutation of browers and platform until it is right!" I'm leaving my layout in tables until this is important enough to me to tackle, which has a strong chance of being never.
I'm looking at the gish 3 column "holy grail" layout and playing with it in a "test" blosxom flavour (http://www.evilgeniuschronicles.org/cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi/index.test for those masochistic enough to look at it). I think there is a serious problem with this strategy, though, in that everything is pixel based in the CSS. You have a banner, and you tell the columns that they are N pixels from the top. Well, how do you know that this is an appropriate number of pixels? If one of the reasons for doing this style of layout is for greater accessibilty for those with reduced vision, how do you know they don't have the font cranked way up? Maybe 50 pixels is no longer enough for a banner. That's the thing with tables, they are not as adaptable but you know that they will flow with the font size if you change it.
Is there some way to make these 3 columns stick right under the banner without having to specify an absolute pixel distance? Something like a "Start where the other stops" functionality would be nice.
I'm farting with my CSS right now too. I'm curious what the upside is to doing the tabular layout entirely in CSS vs. tables. I've seen a few references that make the assertion that CSS is superior, but I don't understand why. For a wag, I might try doing what I'm currently doing as a table with CSS but I'm not sure I get why that is inately better.
How come the Making Light feed is the 15-20 word excerpted kind and Electolite is the full feed? Is there a setting to change that would make ML provide the full post in the feed? 9 times out of 10, the excerpt doesn't have the good stuff so that kind of undoes the utility of reading it in the aggregator.
I don't want to sound ungrateful, as I'll take any feed over no feed. That NetNewsWire autodiscovery sure is something, isn't it? It found RSS for several blogs that I didn't know had it.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2004 | 2 |
| 2003 | 5 |
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