RSS Full Versus Partial Feeds

In my limited understanding,
there are basically two ways
you can use RSS to feed your
content to others:

• A partial feed
• A full feed

A full feed is when you give
your feed audience the whole
article.

A partial feed is when you
give them just the top of
the article.

There are advantages to both
ways of doing things.

A partial feed is really a teaser
of sorts. You are teasing your
audience into clicking here
for more information.

In other words, click here
to read the whole thing.

The advantage of the full feed is
that you do not have to do that.
You do not have to click anything
to read the whole thing.

Here's an article about full feeds
versus partial feeds:

The End of the
RSS Full Text Free Ride

The article refers to partial feeds
as summary feeds. It refers
to full feeds as full text feeds.

Same idea.

It seems to me that the real intent
of the partial feed is to get the
reader to come by for a visit to
your website or blog.

The intent of the full feed, on the
other hand, is to distribute the
information as widely as possible
without anything in the way to inhibit
or slow down the flow of information.

I suspect that as I learn more, I'm
going to favor the full feed over the
partial feed.

The more I think about it, the more I
realize that I don't really like doing
things halfway.

That's my very inexperienced and
unknowledgable opinion at this time.

I'm an RSS beginner so my opinions of
full versus partial feeds will undoubtably
mature over time.

Ed Abbott