Comments on: Please, Publish FULL Feeds

By: Jakob Petsovits

Jakob Petsovits — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 08:56:18 +0000

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/

By: Amy Rose

Amy Rose — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 03:33:00 +0000

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.

By: Marius Scurtescu

Marius Scurtescu — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 17:36:05 +0000

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.

By: TuxGirl

TuxGirl — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 15:18:41 +0000

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.

By: Aaron

Aaron — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 13:10:49 +0000

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.

By: Huygens

Huygens — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 11:56:28 +0000

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

By: Jakob Petsovits

Jakob Petsovits — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 10:40:47 +0000

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.

By: dbr

dbr — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 10:38:19 +0000

“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)

[This comment's field tab-order is still screwy - Hit tab from the main box and it jumps up to the title, when it should go the submit comment box..]

By: Janne

Janne — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 09:21:17 +0000

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.

By: Freddy Martinez

Freddy Martinez — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 04:51:33 +0000

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.

By: Luke

Luke — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 04:25:21 +0000

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.