Nothing is more annoying, then finding a great site, with solid content, only to syndicate their RSS feed, and see the oh-so-very-annoying “More…” link after 1/2 way through the 2nd sentence.
Here’s the thing. The reason I am syndicating your feed, and the reason most others are too, is so I don’t have to visit your site, or other’s sites, to get your content. I have the feeds that I’m interested in, in my feed reader, so I don’t have to visit 100 sites to get the latest news. It comes to me. Why in the world would I want to get just a teaser of the content, and visit your page? Hungry for ad clicks? Want page rank? Looking for site traffic? What?
So, if you publish only descriptions, or summaries in your feeds, chances are, I won’t be reading your blog. It’s the #1 turnoff for me, and I know, for plenty others. Give me the FULL content. I’m not interested in wasting my time following links going to pages.
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Unfortunately feeds can be a massive bandwidth hog — especially if you use a full feed — but those worried about this might try out feedburner or other similar services.
I’ve had to use the tag several times on the Planet because I realize I had written a lot on a topic someone may not be interested. In order to save them bandwidth and time, I just use.
Complete opposite for me – please don’t push the entire post on me. An RSS feed is, for me, a way to collect a lot of new content from a lot of sources in a way that lets me see the headline and a short paragraph summarizing what it’s about. I can quickly scan this list and select (open in new tabs, actually) the ones I actually want to read (in most sites that is less than half, and frequently much less than that).
This doesn’t work if people push the entire contents onto the feed – I might as well just go to the site directly.
The solution for these opposite views? Two feeds – one headline and summary (or just the first paragraph works too, often) and the other with the entire contents. Everybody happy.
“Unfortunately feeds can be a massive bandwidth hog”
Use Feedburner or such – That way it deals with most of the RSS-refreshing-hits, and only sends one request to the RSS feed every so often (Not sure how often exactly)
I agree, partial feeds are annoying – if you only have partials feeds, your forced to go to the site to read (If you’ve ever used an RSS reader offline, that’s extremely anooying)
Where as with a full feed, you can easily flick though posts your not interested in, or read it without having to go out your way – The title of the item should be enough of a summary, in which case most RSS Readers have a titles-only view..
The full feed and partial feed would work (A few sites do that already, Lifehacker has an ad-less partial feed, and an “ad supported full feed” with the posts images and such as well)
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I totally agree with you, and all those “Read more…” links annoy me just as well, but it seems that the use cases for RSS feeds go way further than just our full-fledged newsreaders.
The proposal for two different feeds really feels like a good idea to me. Also, planets could state their preference on full or cut-off feeds, in an attempt to at least unify their format. Not that you’ll ever get consistent stuff from multiple sources.
I also did configure WordPress to have full post in the feeds. But after your message I went to check it out again. This was not the case any more, even though I had it properly set-up in my preferences.
It seems that since release 2.1, what ever you preferences are, WordPress is truncated your feeds when it sees the “more” keyword.
There is a plug-in against that: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/full-text-feed/
which will not take long before I install it
Thanks to you for making me verify my site
Some interesting discussion here.
@Luke- I disagree. RSS/Atom feeds may be XML, and could ultimately be slimmed down, but it’s still plain text. My feed, coming from Feedburner, is only around 57 KB. If you ask me, that’s pretty light. But, if you are concerned about that bandwidth, you have 100K+ readers, Feedburner or other offsite feed services are great.
@Janne- Two feeds is a great idea. Get the likes of everyone.
@dbr- I will say, that banner ads in feeds are also *very* annoying. Good thing for Adblock, when pulling the feed in a web-based reader, such as Google Reader or Bloglines. Ads are the #2 reason why I won’t syndicate your feed.
@Huygens- No problem.
Honestly, I prefer when people have partial feeds. Especially on the Utah Planet, and places like that, it really frustrates me when I have to scroll through a page or more of a post that I’m really not interested in. However, if the first few lines are interesting, I have no problem going to the author’s site. In fact, usually if the first few lines interest me enough, I’m considering posting a comment, which would involve going to the actual site anyways.
Beyond that, if the author is using google adwords or something similar to finance their site, I’d like to show them some support if their blog is interesting, so I’ll go to their site. (no, i don’t have any ads on my site).
Third reason: as a website author, it’s nice to see approximately how many people are reading your site. If they just read it in their feedreader, you don’t get any indication as to whether they liked it, hated it, etc.
Couldn’t agree less! Sorry.
When I am scanning through tens of feeds I really want just a short abstract to decide if I want to read the whole thing or not. The full article is just a click away.
My RSS reader, Akregator, lets me see the actual site right in the reader if I want to, which isn’t a big deal to me.
Chani Armatage (Canadian KDE hacker gone to China) has done a poll on this two days ago, and the response is very impressive:
http://chani.wordpress.com/2007/06/26/to-snip-or-not-to-snip/
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