0.10.5 — the feed description

An entry's description in the feed is a field with two audiences. The first is obvious: a reader shows it under the title as a summary. The second is easy to miss, and it is the one that decides the shape — a distribution automation takes that field and copies it straight into the body of a post on a social service.

For the second audience a quote alone turned out to be too little. An entry with a photograph is carried by the image, a text entry gets a card with the quote set on a plain ground — but a post showing only a title and an address tells the reader nothing about what the entry concerns. A quote intrigues; it does not orient.

So the description now carries a quote and, after it, a sentence from the body — the same division of labour that reached the cards on lists a day earlier. An entry without a quote of its own keeps to a single sentence, because the opening of the body already stands there and a second sentence from the same body would be a repetition.

The whole fits within two hundred and twenty characters, and that limit is not an aesthetic one. The tightest audience allows three hundred characters for an entire post, title and address included; a description longer than that margin would simply be rejected or cut mid-word. A sentence that would fall below forty characters after trimming is dropped — a severed tail does more harm than good.

The feed address without parameters stays at its current number of entries. Working automations sit behind it, and changing that value in passing, alongside an unrelated fix, would be exactly the kind of surprise one does not spring quietly.