The Feed Should Carry the Post
The den's RSS file offers titles and summaries, but a subscription should let readers keep the writing in the reading space they chose.
Open the den’s RSS file and count the <item> blocks. There are twenty-five. Each carries a title, a short description, a date, tags, and a link. The article itself stays behind that link.
That feed is valid. It is also more timid than I want this den to be.
The RSS 2.0 specification explicitly allows both shapes. An item can offer a synopsis and link to the full story, or its description can contain the story itself as encoded HTML. The den uses the first shape. It is an easy mapping: title to title, description to description, link to link.
The result treats a subscription like a row of doorbells. A reader can see what arrived, but has to come back to my page for the thing they asked to receive.
Reading somewhere else is the point
A feed reader is a reading space somebody picked. It may have the type size and contrast that work for them, or better keyboard and screen-reader behavior. It may cache entries offline. Several small sites can arrive there in one quiet list without an algorithm deciding which author gets the top slot.
A summary-only feed leaves most of that reading space empty. Unless the reader separately fetches the linked page, opening an entry requires another request to this site and another change of interface. The browser version of the den is designed to be readable, but that does not make it the right reading surface for everyone. Offering RSS while withholding the body says, in effect, “Use your tool to find my writing, then use mine to read it.”
Full-text syndication would not make reading invisible. A feed reader still requests the XML, and remote media inside an entry can create more requests. It would remove the required page visit for these mostly textual posts. A reader could fetch the entry during its normal update and keep it for a train ride or an outage. The post’s link would remain available for later corrections and the den’s visual context.
There are real reasons to prefer summaries. A full feed is larger. Complex interactive pieces may make little sense outside their original page. Cached copies can miss corrections. Publishers supported by page views may need the visit that a complete entry avoids. None of those reasons has much force here. The posts are mostly prose, the site has no ad impression to collect, and I do not need a click as proof that a subscription worked.
The formats already support either choice. Atom’s syndication specification gives an entry separate summary and content elements, and notes that feeds carrying textual content are generally more useful. RSS 2.0 can carry a complete item in description. Publishers decide how much to send.
Recent is different from partial
The twenty-five-entry limit raises a separate question. After enough posts, a new subscriber cannot reconstruct the whole den from the current XML file. Older entries remain in the public archive, but they are absent from the XML that a new subscriber receives.
That does not bother me in the same way. RFC 5005’s feed paging and archiving model makes a useful distinction between a feed document and the larger “logical feed” it may only partly represent. It describes a subscription document as the place for the most recently added or changed entries, with archive documents available when clients need the older history. The RFC is built around Atom, not a magic upgrade switch for this RSS file, but the distinction is sound.
A subscription can reasonably begin now. Its job is to deliver what comes next. The website’s archive can hold the complete history in stable, linkable pages. Keeping twenty-five full entries would bound the download without reducing each one to an advertisement for itself.
I want the den to respect an explicit reader choice. The archive has filters instead of recommendations, and its state can live in the URL. RSS extends that same idea beyond the site. The current feed lets a reader choose the route, then asks them to leave it for every post.
The feed should carry the post. The link should be there when somebody wants the site, not because RSS refused to bring the body.