PSA: Include full article content in feedsback to blog postsPSA: Include full article content in feeds<br>I recently learned that NetNewsWire supports opting-in individual feeds to &ldquo;always use reader view&rdquo;,<br>so I&rsquo;ve been noticing more closely which of my feeds provide the full content of their feeds versus just a summary,<br>and opting in the latter to that setting where it makes sense.<br>(Annoyingly, this setting doesn&rsquo;t seem to sync across NetNewsWire macOS and iOS, oh well!)<br>Really, this is a PSA:<br>if you&rsquo;re a feed author,<br>you ought to include the full content of the article in your feed ,<br>especially if you&rsquo;re writing a blog.<br>Readers generally prefer being able to read all of the content in their feed reader than going to your site,<br>or using a feed content extractor (which isn&rsquo;t guaranteed to work and takes extra time to run and server resources).<br>Sure — call out that your site has a beautiful design and typography if they&rsquo;d rather read on your site,<br>but include the full content so the reader can make that choice.<br>If you&rsquo;re using Atom feeds, you&rsquo;re in luck:<br>the content element should already be used for the full article content.<br>For RSS, one option is shoving the full content into the description element,<br>instead of a summary of the content.<br>The other option I&rsquo;ve seen documented is leaving the description as the summary,<br>and providing a content:encoded with the full content.<br>Generally, though, prefer the former:<br>Publishers who employ summaries SHOULD store the summary in description and the full content in content:encoded,<br>ordering description first within the item.<br>On items with no summary, the full content SHOULD be stored in description.

(Emphasis mine.)<br>Unfortunately, this doesn&rsquo;t seem to be the default in several popular SSGs, like Hugo,<br>which flipped from content → summary way back in 2017<br>and is still trying to figure out how to enable full content without an override template.<br>(Hugo also doesn&rsquo;t have Atom support yet, although they&rsquo;re working on it.)<br>If you need a reference override template,<br>feel free to pull from my custom Atom feed,<br>and if you need a reference on content:encoded,<br>gohugoio/hugo#4242 may be useful.<br>I haven&rsquo;t checked other SSGs,<br>but I imagine that others might also need to flip a configuration setting or need a similar override.<br>Your readers will thank you. 📖