I don’t know that I’ve ever gotten frustrated enough to rant about it before, but if there’s one thing you remember about me, it should be that I hate, hate, HATE “Summary” RSS feeds. If you’re going to publish an RSS feed, make the damn thing full-text!
I absolutely despise it when I open up a new item whose title interests me, start reading, and then just as I get into the subject, BAM! “Read more…” or “Continue reading…” or just plain “…”. 90% of the time I’ll flat out refuse to continue reading, no matter how interested I was in the topic being discussed.
At this point, I’ve weeded out virtually all of the blogs in my reader that don’t provide full-text feeds. Unfortunately, I’ve also come across several people lately that I’d like to read on a regular basis, but I just can’t stomach their short hacked-to-death feeds. That’s right Craig, I’m talking about you… Babz too. I may put up with this kind of crap from a company that’s out to make a big profit, but after I get through all the ITToolbox blogs, I have very little patience for summaries.
Unless you’re blogging for profit (and then only if you’ve been rejected by AdSense for RSS), there’s absolutely no reason you should make me visit your website to finish reading an article. There are plenty of other ways to get me to check out your site, should there actually be a legitimate reason for me to do so. Hell, even most of the for-profit bloggers still give you full feeds…
7 Comments so far
Anon, on September 27, 2005 at 4:42pm, said:
(toungue firmly in cheek)
Could you please stop advertising other blogs/interesting sites.
I used to be able to get through the ones I was interested in, in about 30 minutes first thing at work every morning.
Now after looking at the ones you throw up (and I bookmark), it takes me an hour and I’m sure the web monitoring is having a field day with my stats!
(/tongue firmly in cheek)
Apart from that - keep up the good work.
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Chris Meller, on September 27, 2005 at 5:40pm, said:
Heh… I know what you mean. I remember when I only had about 15 feeds, and I was able to keep up with them all using LiveBookmarks in Firefox… Now look at me. I’m fighting to stay out of the triple digits…
Now, if you’d start using an online feed reader, like NewsGator Online, they’d only see you visiting their site… And who’s to say you’re not just reading all those Microsoft Knowledge Base Feeds? ;)
Glad someone finds something of interest / use through my blog… I’ll try to keep the interesting links to a minimum from now on. Uhh, just ignore the entire ‘Blogroll and Links’ page at the top…
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craig, on September 27, 2005 at 8:54pm, said:
So your the NewsGator freak. ;) I’m onto ya now. :P
See, the thing is, I love to track you people. I’m such a voyuer. ;)
How else am I to get my stats fetish satisfied?
I’m so damn used to middle clicking title links that appear interesting, later reading those articles on the sites… I do my categories one at a time, tab clicking away. Reading and Tab closing away when nothing else on those sites take my fancy. I tend to read a lot of designers sites… so like to see the pretty pages too.
Each to your own.
You can have your full-text fill now. :P
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Babz, on September 27, 2005 at 10:16pm, said:
I just run my blog from the WordPress, and the feed came standard… if anyone can help me figure out how to make it a full-text feed, I would more than happily change it.
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Chris Meller, on September 28, 2005 at 6:05am, said:
craig: Yes, that’s me. I can’t help it, they’ve been the best (only) online reader I have found. All the others are so-so (except Bloglines, which can just blow me along with Yahoo). I wish I could combine a bunch of features from one reader or another into one super reader, but as with everything else… no time.
Babz: Akk, that’s the default? Bad devs! BBaaaddddd! I’ll have to beat some of them over the head with that. Anyway, you can change it in your Dashboard. Options > Reading, then under “Syndication Feeds”, change the “For each article, show:” setting.
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Babz, on September 28, 2005 at 10:59am, said:
All right, I’ll go in and change that :) Sorry for the only summary, I didn’t even know it was like that lol
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Chris Meller, on September 28, 2005 at 11:03am, said:
You mean everybody doesn’t subscribe to their own RSS feeds? Don’t tell me that’s (another) one of my weird obsessions… :\
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