Please consider publishing a full-text RSS feed for your website or blog

I have used RSS (“Really Simple Syndication”) as my default web browser (for some stuff) for ages now.

Ages as in “20+ years”.

It seems to be enjoying a bit of a resurgence, and I am delighted.

What is RSS

RSS is a way of publishing web content in a machine-readable format.

When you publish a blogpost, as well as the new blogpost showing on your site, it is also added to a file, often call index.xml or feed.xml or similar.

I publish RSS feeds for my personal blog and the decoded.legal blog.

Your loyal, eager readers “subscribe” to your RSS feed, but that just means add the link to that RSS file to their RSS reader or aggregator.

I use FreshRSS as my RSS aggregator (the thing which collects all the RSS feeds), and then Readrops on Android and newsboat (I wrote about newsboat) on Linux to read the feeds.

You can see a list of blogs that I follow via RSS.

A reader’s aggregator or reader periodically downloads the RSS .xml file from each of the sites, and, if there’s an update (because of a new blogpost, most commonly), shows the new blogpost(s) to the reader.

They might even have set up a tool like Calibre - an ebook management tool - to download your feed and convert it into a file that they can enjoy on their ereader.

It is a wonderful way for a reader to create their own personalised reading list of their favourite authors, making sure that they never miss a post.

For authors, it is an easy, free way of making their works available, under their own control, without the hassle or cost of running an email subscription service.

Full-text RSS ftw!

One can make available either (or both) an RSS feed containing snippets of posts (e.g. a headline, perhaps an initial paragraph or sentence, and a link to the website), or the full text of posts (as well as a link).

Please, consider making a full-text feed available!

This is probably as simple as adjusting a config setting in WordPress, or whatever else you use for your blog.

By doing so, you give your readers an easy way of enjoying what you write, without you incurring any extra cost, and lessening the risk of them missing one of your posts.

It is not the end of the world if you do not or cannot do it - I’ve written before about using CSS selectors in FreshRSS to get full-text content for a snippet-only feed - but, by giving them full text, they do not have to faff around with this.

It is also advantageous from an accessibility point of view, as your reader can set up their RSS reader however best works for them, be that a different font, or large font sizing, or just a distraction-free environment, and they still get to enjoy what you write.

If you care about analytics / readership (and I am not one of those people; I’ve no idea how many people read this), then offering an RSS feed might skew these. But if it is skewing it by a statistically significant amount, this just means that lots of people are enjoying what you write! (And I’d have thought that bots were already skewing your stats, but that’s another topic…)

Your own writing, on your own server, just made available to your own readers in a convenient, free of charge way.

What’s not to like!