In talking the subject over with Rob [1] and some email exchanges with Aaron Swartz [2] I've decided that even though I'm a bit relunctant [3] I've decided to go ahead to include the entry bodies in my RSS (Rich Site Summary) [4] feed.
As Aaron said:
But it's OK for their browser to reformat it as they see fit? What if my aggregator is my browser.
He has a point. And if Marcus [5], who spent over a month working on his site design is okay with his RSS (Rich Site Summary) [6] feed …
It wasn't that much work to add the full descriptions (although I did have to add some code to make sure that the entries contained abosolute URL (Uniform Resource Locator)s but nothing difficult).
Now, adding comments to my journal/blog on the other hand …
At first, it was one (Resilient's Livejournal) [7] person asking for comments. After awhile there was someone else (The Compleat Iconoclast) [8]. Now I have a whole gaggle of people clamouring for me to add comments.
Sigh.
It's not like it's difficult or anything; I just don't know how I want to integrate them with the rest of this site. This whole site is an experiment where each entry has a unique URL—and one that isn't tied to a portion of a page (I dislike having to use the fragment portion of the URL to specify a document fragment—why else would I go through the trouble of writing a bunch of code to handle portions [9] of documents [10]?). So I would like to treat comments the same way I treat entries here, but I'm unsure of the best way to go about doing that.
And even if I figure out a way, do I always display the comments? Have a link to read the comments? Not quite cut and dry.
Still pondering …
[1] http://www.tragic-smurfs.com/
[4] https://boston.conman.org/bostondiaries.rss
[5] http://viastellarum.antville.org/
[6] http://viastellarum.antville.org/rss10
[7] http://www.livejournal.com/users/resilient/
[8] http://viastellarum.antville.org/
[9] https://github.com/spc476/mod_litbook