I love blogging, and I’ve talked about that a lot. I also love reading other people’s blogs (blog roll coming soon). Even if they blog about things I have no interest in, I like reading them, and I usually subscribe to their RSS feeds. My “blog” category in FreshRSS is, well let’s say it’s well populated.

Most of the blogs I follow are my fellow “Small Web” bloggers, folks who aren’t doing this professionally and are just catering to a small community. But I have a bone to pick with some of these guys. They have RSS feeds, which is great, but they don’t enable the full content of their posts to be pushed out via that feed. They either limit it to a paragraph, or there’s one guy who limits it to a single sentence. WTF?

I just don’t get this.

I don’t think any of these folks actually monetize their blogs. So, they lose nothing by sending out a full feed, at least as far as I can tell.I get that everyone works hard on making their blog look nice, and if you’re like me, you’ve put effort into creating a nice experience for everyone who visits. But I also don’t care how people read my stuff. If it’s here on the blog, great! If it’s on the RSS feed, that’s cool too. In fact, I want people to use my RSS feed because everyone who uses RSS keeps the standard alive, and RSS is too amazing to be lost.

Maybe those of you who only send out a partial blog post via the feed have your reasons. If so, I respect that. But if you just do it because it’s default or because you’re too attached to people seeing your pretty logo, please reconsider. I’m actually more likely to visit a blog that does send out the full feed than one that limits it. I refuse to visit if you’re trying to catch me with a single sentence. Maybe that’s petty, but I’ll be petty if it means you do the right thing.

Free your RSS, folks.