Some of you noticed that I’d “messed” up the RSS feed for the site yesterday afternoon while mucking around with settings. In fact, I hadn’t messed things up at all. I’m currently torn between giving full content over RSS and wanting to get exact stats on how many people are reading the things that I write.

If I provide the full article through RSS, then the site doesn’t get hit and I don’t know if the article is being read. If I don’t provide the full article, the readers get annoyed because they don’t want to have to go to the site to read it. While I understand the desire to stay in the RSS reader rather than browse to the site, I also see the value in having meaningful statistics.

I’ve decided to compromise. I’ve allowed the full article in the RSS feeds, but have decided to add summaries of the pages to the main site in the case where the articles are quite long. So longer posts are cut short with a ‘Read the rest of this article’ link, and the rest are left alone.

What do you guys think? I’ve just checked the feed, and it appears to be working as it should, so let me know if you have any issues.