During a regular maintenance check of some of my feeds, I noticed something that surprised me. One of the feeds that I had designated as being partial-text was showing up as full-text in my feed readers. If you'll recall previous discussions, some publishers prefer partial-text feeds for two reasons:

1. Partial-text feeds reduce the chances that content will be stolen by sitescraping software. Even if content is stolen, it'll only be an excerpt of each article.
2. Either many feed readers do not respect the update frequency of a feed, or some website publishers have no control over setting the frequency indicator. Because some feed subscribers update their channels several times a day in their feed readers, the same content might be reloaded repeatedly, depending on the feed reader. This increases bandwidth costs - unless you heavily promote a Feedburner type of alternate feed. Although doing so does not stop someone from subscribing to your native feed.

Since all feeds are built from the content of your articles, especially on a weblog/ journal, this conversion ends up in your feeds. The problem with this conversion is that many feed readers, as well as services like Feedburner, no longer have a way to decide where to excerpt a feed. Some feed aggregators, on the other hand, break after a certain number of characters. But a third group only do this properly if there is a hard return in your articles or blog posts.

The net result is that your feed may be served up as full-text, even if you've designated your feed as being partial-text. For those of my feeds that are partial-text, I manually check the raw XHTML code of each article during posting to my weblogs. I actually do the same for those of my feeds designated as full-text. Why? Because if I later decide to switch to partial-text, I don't have to go back into every entry and fix this problem.

>> Raj Kumar Dash, http://www.chameleonintegration.com/

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