If an item in your XML feed is a link to your website article or blog entry, I don't read it - it's that simple.

I don't know about anyone else, but there are lots of times when I read the contents of my RSS aggregator offline. My favourite thing to do when I'm on the plane is catching up on what's happening out there in Java and Internet land that I simply haven't had time to check out during the week. It's a great way to catch up and take advantage of some downtime. The problem is that so many posts from JavaBlogs and others are simply titles with a link to the actual entry, which means I can't read them - which means I don't read them!

I'm new to RSS-aggregator-land, but since I have a Windows XP laptop that I am mandated to use, the best RSS reader for me that I’ve found so far is SharpReader, so that's what I've been using. It serves my purposes okay, especially for the price. I don't know if there are any RSS aggregators out there that will follow all the links there and download them for offline reading, so maybe it's just the client I'm using. With that being said, forget about the client side of things for a moment - just having a "headlines" XML feed makes no sense when folks are terrible at coming up with headlines. For a newspaper, sure, you can usually get the gist of it from the headline, but for blogs "my thoughts on the economy" usually doesn’t cut it. I don't have a problem with summaries - I can at least understand where you're going with it and mark it for later online viewing (or like many you've got revenue models to meet and need folks to see your advertisements), but I just don't have time to do that with the millions of web sites out there that don't include any content in their feeds.

Wil Wheaton has seen the light, so why haven't you?