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@cory Getting people to click through to my site—and read the latest version of the post, and check out the other parts of the site that aren't part of the feed—is the end goal, though?

Juhis

@convexer @cory It might be! If that is your end goal, then you probably fall into the category I mentioned where you have a good reason to not provide full text.

For me personally as a blogger who is not selling anything or running any ads on the site, there's no extra benefit of driving traffic to the site. When I write a blog post, I hope that post itself sparks inspiration, is educational or entertaining or gives the reader something worth their time - no matter where or how they read it.

@convexer @cory I also believe that providing the full text will in the long run end up leading more people to visit your site every now and then because they find your writing valuable and may want to see what else there is.

Getting someone to visit the site because they want to is a much better starting point than having them do it because they must.

@hamatti @cory It's not about ads or money (my goals are similar to yours, in fact), but about the integrity of my writing and image. My posts have a lot of katex, code, and formatting that *will* break in common RSS readers. I also don't want people reading cached copies of posts that I have updated with better information.

@convexer @hamatti ah yeah — my primary concern would be how code/custom components/embeds would work in that context.

@convexer @cory Yeah, definitely falls into the category of "good reasons" to tell people to check them out in the original source.

@hamatti @convexer makes me wonder if there’s some sort of middle ground where I could send the text in full to RSS and swap exceptions with a call to action to check the original

@cory @convexer

If those custom things are not in every post, I would probably add some kind of a flag to the posts that would cause the RSS to render differently, adding an explanation of why this particular post is best viewed in the site.

@cory @convexer But I also don't know the extent of those things as mine very rarely have such custom components that wouldn't render in RSS feeds. So I haven't really looked into what the best way would be.

@hamatti @convexer I’m going to add it to my list and see when I explore a bit

@cory @convexer Some sort of progressive enhancement would be cool.

Having those custom elements in a way that they are readable as simplified text format (in RSS, when no JS, etc) and then enhanced into more interactive/better looking components when possible.

@hamatti @convexer yeah — like that idea. I’m mainly thinking of things like embeds and banners I use for old posts, GitHub repos, NPM packages etc that may need to be excluded.

@cory @convexer A friend built these nice progressive enhancements for code examples a few years back: fotis.xyz/posts/resilient-code

The code blocks are readable in RSS and print styles but on the web, can be turned into interactive CodePen sessions.

I think those are really cool.

Fotis Papadogeorgopoulos · Resilient Code Examples with CodePenMaking code examples in blog posts performant, accessible, and fun.

@hamatti @convexer oh very nice! Just saved that to review.

@cory @convexer For embeds, one could create a custom component with something like blockquotes that is used when there's no Javascript to render the embed.

@hamatti @convexer that makes me want to build it as a web component 😅