Since I started the Twelve Mile Circle in November 2007, I’ve kept the RSS (“really simple syndication”) feed, well, really simple. I’ve used a WordPress option that truncates the feed into an abbreviated form that transmits maybe the first two or three sentences of each article. Today I’ve decided to Free the Feed and send out the entire blog posting for this and each subsequent article.
Nothing will change for those of you who come to the page directly and don’t subscribe to the RSS feed or use a newsreader. You can stop reading and go ahead and enjoy the rest of your weekend. I’ll see you in a couple of days.
Many others of you do subscribe to this blog, either directly pulling the feed to your desktop or using a service such as Google’s Reader or iGoogle; My Yahoo!; Feever°; Bloglovin’; Bloglines; or Netvibes. I have people who follow this blog using all of those methods and more. You are an incredibly loyal audience and I thank you for returning, over and over, and for leaving great comments on the site. I started the site because the subject matter interested me, but I’ve stuck with it because I really enjoy interacting with the people who have decided to join me on this journey of geo-oddities.
I’d long retained the shorter version of the feed because I use lots of embedded maps and I was never really sure how or if they would display correctly when read through a newsreader. Here’s how a Google Map appears. Hopefully it works with your reader.
Images shouldn’t be a problem. I’ve used Google Reader for ages and every blog I follow passes images along just fine without any issues whatsoever. This should work flawlessly:
I switched because a blog I read frequently decided to change its feed and now transmit only the title of each post. I found it incredibly annoying and I came really close to unsubscribing. I’m still undecided if the inconvenience is worth it so I’ll give it a little more time before I take action. Then I considered that I must be the most amazing hypocrite because I’ve inflicting basically the same thing upon you, my loyal readers. That struck home. Now I’m transmitting everything.
If it doesn’t look acceptable then I figure you can always jump from your newsreader over into my website and see it in the original context. Please let me know if freeing the feed works better for you or if you’d prefer that I go back to the truncated version. Or does it matter at all?
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