Please stop updating your sites and breaking your RSS feeds.
By breaking, I mean any of the following:
- Truncating the XML entries to only be the first chunk of the body content.
- Only publishing the title and summary of the body content.
- 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.1 Hugo exposes it at /index.xml by default. WordPress has
had a feed at /feed/ since version 1.0. Jekyll outputs to
/feed.xml. Most generators follow the same pattern.
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.2 The average webpage today is several megabytes of JavaScript. A full-text RSS entry for even a long post is measured in kilobytes.
For the sake of the open web - and especially for the sake of not hating your audience - stop breaking your feeds.