I hate oversimplified, ugly RSS feeds.

I use Google Reader and I find it frustrating that I can’t use RSS for some of my favorite blogs (which I’m slowly reading less of) because the RSS is ugly. Here lies my standards for the ideal RSS feed:

1. At least one image, but no more than 2. I like visuals, and alot of the blogs I follow are mostly about the visuals. Even the one’s that aren’t – I like to see the photo on the post. So many feeds strip the photo. This is annoying. I’m not going to go to the website to see a picture for every single post.
2. Too much shortening. I’m gonna have to see more than 2 sentences. I find that mostly news sources are guilty of this. This is tolerable, if the article seems interesting I’ll go ahead and click & go to the website. I wish there was a built-in RSS thing to expand however, so there would be less clicking, tabs & pages involved.
3. Not enough shortening. I don’t shorten my posts at all but I feel like my posts aren’t big enough to clog up your feed. When you have a post with 10 paragraphs and an image between each paragraph, it’s annoying to scroll down through the stuff I’m not interested in. Google Reader also doesn’t have an easy way to close/hide/mark read an item. You usually have to click the preceding item to hide it. I write a long post from time to time, but what annoys me with this is blogs that have consistently long posts without a more tag.

I admit that when I did PinkZap I had alot of readers through RSS, and I never took care to make sure my RSS looked good. I was mostly focused on the look of the website. I’ve heard recently that RSS is dying. But I hope RSS doesn’t die. I like using it.