Nope, I’m fine with the full feed indeed! I guess it won’t hurt anything if you also offer the summary feed. A few might be confused about it, but so be it, I guess.

Don’t worry, I wasn’t going to take the full feed away from you!

It’s the confusing people I am worried about. I don’t want the sidebar to turn into a whole messy smoosh of options.

If you’re worried about aesthetics, have one RSS button in the sidebar that, when clicked, will take folks to a page with options. An “RSS about page” of sorts?

A good idea, but I know it bugs me when there isn’t an immediate “this is my rss link” to hand on a blog.

It’s part an aesthetics thing and part a “who actually uses RSS?” thing - I’ve been yammering on about RSS for near three years but Moose still doesn’t use it: she tried it but it wasn’t for her. I have a feeling that she is more representative of most of my readers as opposed to the geek-few who utilize RSS.

I am taking all suggestions into consideration though so keep ‘em coming

Personally, I hate summary feeds. I’ve actually unsubscribed from a few blogs solely because they only offered summary / clipped feeds.
If you were writing about very (different) topical things.. say you were writing about in-depth history stuff, and on other days, writing about bio-ethics.. well, it’d be nice to have feeds for each topic (I’d pick the history one obviously; bio-ethics don’t interest me much). But, seeing as your blog is fairly personal, I like the full feed, personally.

’ve been yammering on about RSS for near three years but Moose still doesn’t use it: she tried it but it wasn’t for her.

*gasp!* I often forget that not everyone uses RSS feeds. For a while there I wasn’t using them much, because I burnt myself out on the whole blogging / RSS reading bit. I’m back into it now, just with a throttle set all the time. If I didn’t use RSS, it’d take me days to make 1 round of my ‘reading stuff’.

Also as an aside while talking about RSS… the updated Google Reader is AWESOME. I love it. I’d been using the desktop app FeedReader for a while, but after seeing the new GR, I dropped FeedReader like a hot pan.

I’m with Josh on this. Summary feeds drive me nuts.

Proper structured summaries are OK, although I’d worry about the personal blogger who had the time to write out a summary as well as the actual post. But most are snippets of the first 100 characters or so and are the most likely feeds I’ll unsubscribe from.

Posts + Comments feed maybe?

I never used to mind whether it was summarized or full content, because I never used to read in my reader. However, gReader’s recent revamp actually makes reading within the reader bearable, so I’ll take full text feeds, ta.

Well I use your full feeds because sometimes I don’t have time to visit your blog. If there was no choice whatsoever, I would use your summary feeds, but as long as there is the full feed for me to read. I’d still use it.

I do have my full feed, my comment feed and my cocomment feed on my sidebar though, all intergrated into the sidebar as what it shows so it doesn’t clutter things up. I like to ask myself, what would I use if I was another blog, then I’d put it in.

Full feeds will *not* be taken away from anyone. I’d promise this but normally as soon as I utter the words “I promise” things go downhill very rapidly. Put it this way - I can’t foresee the need for me to remove the full feed from Bright Meadow.

I also can’t see the need to publicize the summary feed at the moment, other than I like to give people choice.

Put this way: Screw choice! We’ll take what you give us. lol

Buh…

*wanders off confused*

Well, you’re all still reading after I turned the site pink, so I have to assume y’all got a high tolerance threshold.

I do like to keep my readers happy though…

Would I use a summary feed? Not if I can help it.

When I check feeds, I like the option of just quickly reading it in my reader or visiting the site. A full feed gives me the chance to see how long the post is. A quick oneliner with link, I might check out instantly; a longer post I might keep for later.

Also, I nearly always click-through and read the posts on-site. It keeps me in touch with people’s blogs, their sidebars or other goodies that might have been updated and it’s easy for commenting.

Reading feeds in my reader feels too much like reading e-mail and it quickly gets too impersonal.

Other feeds I’d like to see? Your Diggs, your comments elsewhere, your del.icio.us or blinklist feed, your OPML… I mean, just bare it all!

The majority of my links (del.icio.us, Flickr, cocomment) can be found on the links page, as can a link to bloglines which has a (fairly) up-to-date list of what I read.

Enjoy

what do you need RSS feeds for anyway?? You all come and play in the meadow daily anyway! The people to ask are the ones who read but don’t comment, but they wouldn’t tell you anyway because, well, they don’t comment.

RSS means you don’t have to check each day to see if I have updated or not - you will be notified of any new content automatically.

It is also very useful when you are on a dodgy connection because (if you have a desktop reader like Vienna and not a web-based reader) you just download all the latest posts then log off to read at your hearts content.

But yeah, it’s really not as common as people think. My world doesn’t stop turing if a website doesn’t have RSS (though I am less likely to remember to come back to that website).

But I still haven’t heard from the 6 summary- feed users. Come on, ‘fess up!

Um, Cas (and Moose), really, my world does stop without RSS. Granted, it also ’stops’ with RSS because I now have so many feeds I can barely keep up. Tragic perhaps, but yeah…

Sites whitout RSS that I still visit are classic news sites (BBC, CNN or my own national news provider - high quality I can tell you). Getting feeds from them too would clog up everything. So, those sites I visit, when I like. similar to turning on the TV news, really.

How did I notice these comments after mine? Because of RSS. Let’s say that RSS ROCKS. No?

And, Cas… I never knew about that page. You’ve quenched my thirst for knowing all about everyone Hooray!

PS (and feel free to merge this with my previous comment) I would really love a great OPML sharing tool that’s also quick and reliable (I don’t read Bloglines either) and a neat page where I could share all of the above, without turning my blog into a links barrel… If that makes any sense?

Have you tried Share My OPML?

I understand about the “too many feeds” issue. Every few months or so I go through my list and get ruthless, trying to reduce the list to around 150 (including BBC news feeds). In fact, it’s time to go do it again.

Not my favourite chore, but it’s got to be done.

You subscribe to the maximum 150 relationships philosophy as well? Interesting…
Does anyone have a different number of RSS feeds they like to keep to?

I’ve tried different numbers over the two/three years I’ve been using RSS and 150 is the number I keep coming back to as optimum. More than that I am just swamped and can’t keep up, missing things. Less than that I an I get bored.