You may have noticed that a few of my most recent posts seem a bit, well, truncated. Brief. Stoic.

This is because Textpattern, my beloved weblog software, will publish an article’s excerpt in lieu of the whole article if an excerpt exists for the article.

I’ve been doing some thinking on this, and I’ve decided that I’m going to start writing excerpts for all but the shortest of articles (where, for example, the excerpt would be longer than the actual post).

This is going to make my RSS and Atom feeds (including the snortasprocket feed) a bit lightweight. You’ll have to click through to the main article to get the goods. But, all in all, I think this will be OK for me and you. Here’s why:

• You can read the excerpt and decide whether or not you want to click through and actually read the article. This helps me and you: I’ll know by site traffic which articles people actually bother to read, and you can skim my updates faster.
• I’m doing a redesign of Snort a Sprocket. It will be stripped down and simple, much like reading a nicely typeset book. There will be a place for said excerpts. You’ll see.

So, for those of you who liked my old “full article” feeds, I am sorry, but this is what I’ve decided to do. I hope you’ll still stop by. If not, I’ve sure loved having your company, and can only look towards the future when we meet again.

Sincerely,
Scott

UPDATE: At the request of a few, the <description> field in the Textpattern RSS feed has been +0++411Y h4X0R3d to indicate clearly that what you are reading is indeed an excerpt or summary. I’ll get to the Atom feed later.