i’ve updated the rss feed to make it ever so slightly more readable. i chop item descriptions off at 500 characters and previously, as jon udell noted, you could be left with a truncation that “didn’t respect” word or sentence boundaries. well, john made those comments over a year ago and i’m just now getting around to fixing it, which should give you a peak into my profound ability to procrastinate.

for now, i’ve just added a “…” at the end of a truncated post. this might be a first step towards providing two different feeds, abridged and full-length, but i’m not sure. in case you’re wondering, i didn’t start truncating my rss feed in an attempt to drive traffic to my site. honest. at the time, i thought it did improve readability a bit, but more importantly the rss 1.0 recommends that the description field should have a maximum length of 500 characters.