Well, now it is recognized by those who discuss and hash out what the general feeling and consensus is on "best practices" for various types of things, that "best practice" for providing rss/etc. feeds is to provide full feeds. People will just drop you if it adds up to too much time vs. the other blogs they enjoy that do not put an extra step in the reader's path. I quote from Google:
There's a steady debate on the issue of full-content feeds vs. partial-content feeds. While there are good reasons to choose either option, the user experience is generally better with full-content feeds, as the user no longer needs to click through to read an article. Be aware that some users choose not to subscribe to partial-content feeds because of the extra effort involved in reading them.
I know for some, with Google Ads, alot of the advice out there on "make money blogging" type sites which I've stumbled on, is to use truncated feeds so the person has to click through to actually come to your site. Besides, these ads can be put in feeds now too (even though that annoys me, but my eyes flick past it anyway.) That program also recommends full posts in feeds as best practice.
Also, current and cutting-edge feed readers have options, plugins, or scripts available that allow or are designed to preview/show the whole post within the reader, regardless of the truncated setting by the blog's owner. Still, this requires a bit different treatment in the feed reader's behavior, and as such, the truncated feeds are still . . . a pet peeve, a . . . thorn in the side, or some such, that eventually may become bothersome enough for the reader to dump that particular feed.
My feelings are strong on this, but that's how I feel. For blogs that I do enjoy, that do not make me jump through hoops (excepting those of online friends or places/people I've come to interact with online, or said outstanding head-and-shoulders above their field kind of blogs), I generally end up at their site for one reason or another from time to time, anyway. Not because of an artificial block put in my way, though.
I'm going to cross-post this to all my blogs, so I apologize in advance for that.
2 comments:
I agree with you. If I have to click a 'more' button to get the rest of the post every time I get frustrated. it not only makes me take an extra step but it takes me away from where I want to be...in my aggregator, saving time and reading my favorite blogs.
I think bloggers that do this are doing themselves a disservice. I won't click through to get you the hit you are forcing and I probably won't be back, which is unfortunate because some of them have really good content.
I have absolutely NO idea how feeds work or if my blog has that problem -- ???? That part of the technology has me stumped. I don't even know how to check it. I DO know that the blogs I subscribe to that get stored to my Yahoo blog storing thingee, I do have to click it to open the blog, but that doesn't bother me -- is that what you are talking about?
Post a Comment