OJ’s rants What would OJ do?

Stop Cutting your Feeds Short

Despite the fact the Internet is accessible from nearly everywhere, there are still times when you are forced to work in a disconnected environment. There are also times where you want to work in a disconnected environment (probably to avoid distractions from IM, Twitter, etc).

So why is it that we still don't seem to do a good job of catering for these cases? Offline capabilities are currently few and far between. Sure, it can be hard to add offline functionality to an application, depending on what the application does, but sometimes there's really no excuse.

One example where there is no excuse: blog feeds!

These days everyone seems to have a chunk of Google Ads on their blog pages in the hope they'll be Slashdotted, Reddited or Digged enough to bring in a small fortune in advertising revenue. While I can understand the desire to earn some cash from writing, I don't think it's a good enough excuse to cut the content of the RSS/Atom feeds short.

To read an article offline, those of us who use a reader which supports offline reading capabilities (which include the likes of Google Reader via Google Gears) end up missing out on the content of each article which doesn't make it to the feed in its entirity.

While this is frustrating for the reader, it can be damaging for the writer as well. I personally have removed fistfuls of feeds from my reading list because they expect me to browse to their sites. I don't plan on returning to those sites in the future either. I'd be very surprised if I was the only person who has done this or who will do it in the future.

Thankfully I am yet to come across an semi-fed article while offline that I do want to read. But I reckon I'll be pretty pissed the day it does happen.

In short, stop cutting your f**cking feeds short. Please