Please use descriptive titles for posts!

June 25, 2003 2:27 PM

RSS feed request: having recently set up the RSS feed plugin in Trillian, it has come to my attention that many people set titles which rather than being descriptive of their threads are just little comments. For example: "Yikes", "Listen Closely", etc.
Please, I'm begging you, use descriptive titles for your posts.
posted by signal to etiquette/policy at 2:27 PM (14 comments total)

My next post, whatever the content, will be entitled "Naked Pictures of Signal".
posted by PinkStainlessTail at 2:31 PM on June 25, 2003

But the funny commentary in the title tag is my favorite part...
posted by jonson at 2:59 PM on June 25, 2003

Using descriptive titles in the RSS feed would eliminate the need to come to MetaFilter and actually read the threads. We're just trying to keep you from becoming estranegd from the community.
posted by kindall at 3:09 PM on June 25, 2003

Shhh. Damnit Kindall, we've been trying to get rid of signal for months now.
posted by eyeballkid at 3:27 PM on June 25, 2003

I thought this sounded familiar.

Judging from the earlier thread, I'm doubting you'll get much help from this crowd. Me, I like the "aside" nature of titles here, but I imagine it would be annoying for an RSS feed.

Can the feed be changed to pull something other than the title?
posted by frykitty at 3:43 PM on June 25, 2003

!
posted by y2karl at 3:45 PM on June 25, 2003

Judging from the earlier thread, I'm doubting you'll get much help from this crowd.

Especially considering this word from above.
posted by languagehat at 3:55 PM on June 25, 2003

Matt said at one point that titles are supposed to be witty. I think he means witty and descriptive, though. Personally, I don't like them at all, but then I don't use any RSS doohickeys.
posted by Hildago at 4:29 PM on June 25, 2003

What does rss look like in trillian? Can you not see the content of a post at all?

Every reader I use has some functionality to display the post, so witty titles aren't that big of a pain, because I can just click through to see the full post.
posted by mathowie at 4:55 PM on June 25, 2003

Matt: when you hover over a title in Trillian, it gives you the raw html of the post, so yes, you can decipher what it says (usually), but it's still a pain. I understand your point about witty vs. informative, though.
posted by signal at 5:27 PM on June 25, 2003

What, pray tell, IS an RSS feed?
posted by konolia at 6:19 AM on June 26, 2003

It is the annual dinner of the Royal Statistical Society.
posted by walrus at 6:44 AM on June 26, 2003

konolia: I wondered the same thing.
posted by trharlan at 7:32 AM on June 26, 2003

According to Tim "XML" Bray, it stands for "Reliably Spiteful Squabbling".
posted by timeistight at 8:55 AM on June 26, 2003