Full-text versus summary feeds

Full content earns reader loyalty and costs you page views. The right answer depends on how you are funded, not on a technical preference.

The trade-off, stated plainly

<!-- A summary feed that still gives a real teaser -->
<item>
  <title>Streaming transforms</title>
  <link>https://example.com/posts/streaming</link>
  <guid isPermaLink="false">post-streaming</guid>
  <description>How the transformer reduces memory by an order of magnitude &mdash; and
  where the approach stops working.</description>
  <!-- no content:encoded -->
</item>

<!-- A full-text feed that keeps its own monetisation and attribution -->
<item>
  <title>Streaming transforms</title>
  <link>https://example.com/posts/streaming</link>
  <guid isPermaLink="false">post-streaming</guid>
  <description>How the transformer reduces memory by an order of magnitude.</description>
  <content:encoded><![CDATA[
    <p>How the transformer reduces memory by an order of magnitude.</p>
    <p><em>This article first appeared at
    <a href="https://example.com/posts/streaming">example.com</a>.</em></p>
  ]]></content:encoded>
</item>

• If you decide on full text, include an attribution line with a link. It costs one sentence and is what most republishing licences require.
• Strip your own analytics and relative URLs. A relative image path or a tracking pixel breaks in every reader.
• Keep the site's canonical URL on the item, so an aggregator that republishes can link back to the original.
• Never mix: a feed that claims full content but truncates mid-sentence with an ellipsis is worse received than an honest summary.

Ads, paywalls and syndication

• Inserting ads into content:encoded is legitimate but keep them as markup, not as tracking images, and make them clearly labelled.
• For paywalled sites, publish the summary without restriction and make the full feed available to authenticated subscribers as a private feed URL.
• A private feed URL is a secret, so treat it as a credential: rotate it, never log it, and never email a link that contains it in the query string.
• Use dc:rights or a clear sentence in the description to state what republication is allowed; silence is read as permission by some aggregators.
• An archive feed with the full history plus a recent feed for new items is a common publisher pattern, and readers handle it better than a hundred-item feed that never changes.

from flask import Flask, request, abort, Response

app = Flask(__name__)

@app.get("/feed/<token>.xml")
def subscriber_feed(token: str):
    subscriber = lookup_by_token(token)
    if subscriber is None or subscriber.expired:
        abort(404)                     # 404, not 403: do not confirm the token exists
    items = build_items(full_content=True, for_subscriber=subscriber.id)
    resp = Response(render_rss(items), mimetype="application/rss+xml")
    resp.headers["Cache-Control"] = "private, no-store"
    return resp

FAQ

Related

Namespace extensions: content:encoded, dc: and Media RSS Feeds at scale: pagination, archives and pipelines

Last refreshed 2026-09-18.