Category feeds — and other feeds

Kalsey on cat­e­gory feeds:

If I were to pro­vide a feed for my Mov­able Type tips cat­e­gory, there would be thou­sands of peo­ple read­ing it but never see the other things I write about. In my mind that would be bad, because I’m a bit more well-rounded than my knowl­edge of Mov­able Type.

I thought a bit about my own feeds as I’m slowly mov­ing through the stages of the blog redesign. I’ve wanted to pro­vide more feeds for some time as I think it would be nice to be able to choose between full posts from one blog, all three blogs in one feed, with/without com­ments etc. — or maybe just a feed with con­tent from the ‘bla bla’ (blah blah? misc. per­haps is bet­ter?) and a feed with­out it. I might even gain a few read­ers on that account; peo­ple inter­ested in a cer­tain topic but defi­nately not in get­ting their aggre­ga­tor clut­tered with local Dan­ish nonsense.

On the other hand I’m pretty much with Kalsey on this one. One of the things mak­ing blogs the valu­able tools they are, is the way high-value, to-the-point con­tent get mixed up with the more easy-going, chit-chat’ish per­sonal stuff (per­sonal, not pri­vate). It makes fil­ter­ing weblogs so much eas­ier, just as your favourite librar­ian might not be the best — but the one you like the best. And there’s a good chance that once you tune in to a person’s inter­ests and writ­ing style, you just might end up catch­ing good hints, inter­est­ing reviews etc. from some of the ‘off-topic’ posts (there are no off-topic posts on a per­sonal weblog, I know).

But then again: Hope­fully one’s read­ers are clever enough to decide what’s best for them; I think I’ll go for the ‘more feeds’-approach.