Full Text Feeds Only, Please. Or I’m Gone
November 8, 2007
Welcome to BloggingNotes. You may want to subscribe to my full text RSS feed. This message will only appear once. Thanks for visiting!
There’s been a lot of debates (OK, battles) over the years in the world of technology and the Internet. Windows vs Mac. Open source vs closed source. Vi vs Emacs. And another that has turned up in the last couple of years has been Full vs Partial RSS feeds.
There are benefits to both types. A full text feed will allow you to get the raw information that you need from a site, as efficiently as possible. You can burn through an amazing amount of information in a very short time (especially if you scan titles and skip over the posts with titles that suck).
Partial text feeds, however, will require your reader to click on a link to get back to your site to read the rest of the post, ensuring traffic coming directly to your blog. If you’re running Adsense, or any sort of advertising, this may be what you want to happen. Plus, you spent a lot of time getting your layout just the way you want, so that your site stands out from the hordes, right?
I am in the full feed camp myself, simply due to the fact that I don’t have time to visit the 83 sites that I follow each day on an individual basis. I’d never get anything else done if I tried to keep up that way, and I’d miss out on a LOT of information.
Right now as I look at Google Reader I see 913 unread items. How long do you think it would take me to read the first paragraph or two of each of those, and then click on the ‘Read More’ link and wait for the page to load, and then find the unread portion in the post? Sorry, not interested.
Essentially it comes down to this: If I subscribe to a feed and then find out that it’s only a partial feed, I unsubscribe. NO EXCEPTIONS. There are sites that I probably should be subscribed to, but I’m not simply because they don’t offer a full feed.
Every blog that I maintain has a full text RSS feed. Am I missing out on people coming to the site and clicking on Adsense? Yeah, possibly. But as I check the stats for this site, I’ve had about 1100 page views. And according to Feedburner, there are 4 subscribers to my feed. So, I hardly think that those 4 polls to my feed would be “stealing” Adsense revenue. And my site’s hardly unique. You’ll ALWAYS have more visitors to the actual site than RSS subscribers. And there’s certainly nothing wrong with placing ads in the RSS feed. I have a couple of sites that I’m subscribed to that offer full text feeds with ads, or partial feeds without. Guess which one I’m subscribed to.
Other partial text fans will claim that they’ve worked hard on getting their site laid out properly, with a good theme, in order to make it stand out. And how can their site stand out if someone just subscribes to the feed and all they see is *text*?
Well, here’s a bit of news. I don’t *care* what your site looks like. I’m there to get the information from your site. Not look at your widgets, and colour scheme. You want to make me read your post in Google Reader? Fine, your post needs two things: an honest title that will make me want to read it, and, more importantly, quality content. That’s how your feed stands out from the rest. Teach me something. Make me look at something in a different way. Make me think.
I won’t begrudge anyone who wants to offer a partial text feed. It’s their choice.
But I won’t read it.
Related Posts
Posted in Blogging
content rss
November 8th, 2007 at 10:26 am
One thing to watch out for when setting up your links for your feed is that you use a RSS 2.0 feed. If you use the old 0.92 format your posts will be cut off at about 200 characters, even if you don’t use the -more- tag.
November 8th, 2007 at 10:31 am
Good point, Frank. Thanks for mentioning that. It’s been a long time since I’ve dealt with a 0.92 version feed.
November 8th, 2007 at 10:50 am
I like Full RSS Feeds. I started out with a partial feed (because I didn’t know how to do them properly) but once I figured out how to code it to work and parse my posts properly I am stuck on Full.
Even if I read the entire post I still visit the site. Especially if I want to post a comment or read the other comments.
November 8th, 2007 at 12:30 pm
As soon as I finish this I will be added you to my RSS feed. I don’t have a huge number of sites on my feed at this point, but as I surf around I am finding so much information that I keep added. At this pace I will be buried in RSS in a couple of months.
I like full RSS because it gives me a choice. I can read the entire post in my reader or I can elect to go to the website to read it. I like the flavour from some blogs. Abridged Feeds force you to the site it you are interested in the post. Give me the choice.
Nick
November 8th, 2007 at 1:13 pm
@Tyler: Yeah, I will actually click through to the site fairly frequently, even if not to comment, but to read other comments, like you mentioned.
Thanks for the feedback.
November 8th, 2007 at 1:15 pm
@Nick: Thanks for the comment and for adding the feed to your stable of feeds. Choice is ultimately what it comes down to.