Automated Short Description
I have been giving some thought about this recently. I am going to release an optional "short-description" feature tonight that I hope everyone will use for posts longer than a sentence or two. (instead of the full post text appearing in the feed, only the short-description will appear) I am not going to advertise in the individual blogs (although, I am going to implement some kind of revenue generating "thing" for the root .NET Weblogs as the site continues to grow), but I personally want to see the number of page views vs. Rss feed hits even out a little more. Syndirella, Newsgator, etc are all great, but they do take away (just a little) from the community. My hope is people will read a post, make a comment or two, check out the referrals/pingbacks/trackbacks and all of the other links that float around .NET Weblogs.
[ScottW's ASP.NET WebLog]
You could just automate this feature, and have a switch in the admin tool for it. When enabled any post longer than say X characters would be cut down to the first 4 sentences or so and then have a link for the rest. You could use some Regex to get the first couple sentences, then we would not have to write a description and then the post.
- James