Stop Breaking Your Feeds

Please stop updating your sites and breaking your RSS feeds.

By breaking, I mean any of the following:

1. Truncating the XML entries to only be the first chunk of the body content.
2. Only publishing the title and summary of the body content.
3. Killing the feed altogether (likely because you didn't know you had one).

If you set up your site yourself with a static generator like Hugo or something more comprehensively painful like Wordpress, you may not even know that your site has an RSS feed built in by default. Anyone can point a piece of software known as a feed reader at the URL your RSS feed lives at and read what you write wthout having to visit your site to check for new content.

This is because the reader routinely checks the feed URL for new posts in the form of XML entries that should contain the title of the post and the full content.

Plaintext is not that heavy, and it is certainly not as heavy as all the third-party plugins and JavaScript abominations behind your frontend.

I have a list of blogs and channels I like to follow in the bar up top. I've updated it to reflect feeds that, at this time, do not adhere to RSS feed best practices of publishing, at a bare minimum, the title of the post and the full body content, as well as the feeds that used to work but have stopped.

For the sake of the open web - and especially for the sake of not hating your audience - stop breaking your feeds.