I’m fairly new to the idea of browsing RSS feeds instead of browsing websites. As someone who counts on people visiting my site to generate revenue in various forms, the idea of a system that bypasses all that frightens me a little. For this reason, the PvP feed has never included the daily strip itself, only a link back to the site.

Recently, Danielle Corsetto and I got an email from a fan of ours named Andy Ihnatko. If the name sounds familiar, it’s because Andy is a technology pundit for the Chicago Sun Times and is a frequent co-host on Macbreak Weekly. Andy wanted us to consider trying full feeds, comic strips and all, just as an experiment.

“My specific advice would be to go full-RSS for a whole month. Close your eyes and do it. Use that as a point of promotion, too: tell everyone that you’re putting every strip in this new RSS feed for at least a whole month, and hope that this is enough to get The Beat et al to give you a quick link.

See if you can make it work for you, either by following each strip with some one-liners linking to items in the store, or by adding a weekly/twice-weekly post which has some friendly words from the artist plus, oh yeah, donate some money, you bastards!

The beauty thing is that if after a month you decide that it’s not worth your while (or if you’re still afraid that it’s going to bit you in the butt) you can drop back to PVP-style RSS (notification and link only). The people who subscribed to it when it was a full feed will still be subscribed and I’d be shocked if at the end of the experiment you hadn’t picked up some new readers.

So I’m taking Andy’s challenge and putting the strip in the RSS feed. You can read it right there, without hitting the site. I’m only promising this for a month, just to see what happens and to give Andy’s advice a fair shake.