Hi,

What should the length of an RSS Feed be? Well I guess it should be, how many items should an RSS Feed have on it? 5, 10, 15, 50, 100?

I'm just playing around with an xml document for the company I work for and was just curious what other people do.

Cheers

Sort of a subjective question... It depends on various things, like how often you update content, how long you personally want entries to remain on a feed, etc...

Another thing to consider is that most RSS feed checkers are very dumb--they'll download the whole feed rather than just checking HTTP headers to check whether there are changes. Even though RSS feeds are just text files, this kind of behavior can eat through bandwidth fast, so it'd be in your interest to keep your feed short.

I'd take tamasrepus and keep it as short as possible.

You can also offer multiple or dated feeds.

I was talking to a person here at work and he mentioned that he keeps his as long as he wants. The readers can be set to exclude things after a certain time period.

I guess I could make it just archive say after a month and start with a fresh xml document so I dont get gigantic text files of old news ;)

On another note:
How do most people use RSS Feeds? I just want to do a title and quick blurb with a link that points to the content on the website. Talking to the same person above about this he said he likes to put all the data into the Feed so that people dont have to visit the site.

Isnt the point of RSS Feed to allow people to see what's new with the website/company so that they come to it?

Just my thoughts.

Thanks

Yes, readers can exlcude items after a certain date... But keep in mind, most people won't bother and will take your feed as it is.

Whether you want short blurbs or full content is still subjective...

If it's a personal site, it doesn't really matter. If business, you want people to come to your site and while they are there, see your other products and services.