Full feed lament

This is probably going to sound pretty old fashioned but I miss the days when more blogs published full feeds and the exception to that norm was a truncated feed. Back then, in the old days of blogging, publishing full feeds just seemed to be more honest.

When I subscribe to a feed these days and receive a full feed, it feels like a rare honesty in a Web of selfish truncated feeds designed to pull me onto a page with banner ads I ignore. For the most part I only click on those links to reach the main page which I send to Instapaper without much thought about the ads the site owner was hoping I’d click on.

Sure, people should be able to earn a living from their well tended and populated sites but give me an option to still get my full feeds. One model I haven’t seen replicated much (actually, at all) is Ars Technica which charges me less than $5 a month for premium content and, wait for it, full feeds. There are times when I don’t read many of their posts but, when I do visit my feed in my feed reader, I am reminded how grateful I am that I have the option of subscribing for the convenience of full feeds.