Giles' blog

Should RSS feeds contain the full blog post?

A question for people who read this blog over RSS -- should the feed contain the full posts? I split every article into "above the fold" and "below the fold" sections. On the site itself, this serves a useful function -- you can scan through the front page or a topic page and see the intros to different posts so that you can work out what might be of interest to you.

Right now, I only put the "above the fold" content into the RSS feed. There's no particular reason for that, I was just copying certain other blogs I read. But I've noticed recently that some particularly good blogs use the full post text. Perhaps I should switch to that?

Pros: you can read everything in a post without having to click a link and switch app.

Cons: some of my lab notes posts can get absurdly long, and perhaps that wouldn't work well in RSS readers.

What do you think?

Vote in the comments below :-)

@misc{thomas2025mar-full-text-in-rss,
  author       = {Thomas, Giles},
  title        = {{Should RSS feeds contain the full blog post?}},
  year         = {2025},
  month        = mar,
  howpublished = {Blog post},
  url          = {https://www.gilesthomas.com/2025/03/full-text-in-rss},
}