Abbreviated
Posted: Thu 2 April, 2009 Filed under: D4D™, Geeky, Thoughts 9 Comments »This post is about RSS feeds and so on. If you neither know nor care what an RSS feed is, don’t even bother clicking on the ‘more’ link below…
Until working in the current place, I’ve never really used RSS feed-readers. However, with the work firewall blocking lots of stuff I normally read, I’ve resorted to using Google Reader for a number of sites – it’s very handy, if only for the fact that it means the sites I’m reading don’t hit work’s proxy server. Now there’s something that they don’t advertise…
Anyway, for the most part it’s nice and easy to use Reader.
But. Ah, there’s always a but, isn’t there?
On D4D’s RSS feed – and on most others I read – it’s set to publish the full post to the RSS stream. But there are some sites that don’t do this – so it means I either have to try and get to the proper site to read the posts, or – and this is the more common action for me, I admit – just not bother reading the posts at all.
So – other than supposedly driving people to read your posts on your site (an argument which is flawed as per the above paragraph) – what’s the point of just putting the first 50 words, or whatever, as an RSS feed? Is there a reason?
I agree; I’ve stopped reading any blog that doesn’t publish the whole post in the RSS feed. Google Reader is the place I read blogs and you have to be “really special” for me to pay a personal vist, my list of “really special” blogs went from one to zero at some point last year.
So I should be honoured you’ve visited here to comment?
*grin*
is it a default setting? I mean, for those who are a little hazy on how all this stuff works, and have no idea whether or not their blogs are set to post anything on any stream, or what it looks like when it gets there, chances are that it’s going to stick to whatever the default at the time it was set uo were.
I believe blogging is about give and take. If people don’t give (ie comments) I can’t be bothered with them.
Therefore, I only publish the first few words in my feed so that people know when I’ve updated, but have to click through to read the post. Which also then gives them the opportunity to give me something back for my effort.
Because, as I always say, a blog without comments is a website. Comments are a dying art. Which is not a trend I agree with. There are very few of us these days who comment as much as we used to – due, I believe to the fact that blogs are ‘cheap’ and consumable in large quantities thanks to feed readers.
I don’t use a feed reader, because I think I know the few blogs I follow well enough to guess when they have updated. And I like to give as well as receive. And my brain can’t follow too many things at once, at a reasonable level. I’d rather be selective.
I really don’t know where the setting is on Blogger etc. but your one is fine, so I *assume* that the default is to publish full posts rather than sort ones…
This post was published in full on Bloglines.
Not everyone will have time to comment on every post – BW comments regularly (thank you, BW) but not every time, why should she? I agree that comments ‘make’ the blog but that doesn’t mean that people who read the blog therefore enter into a contractual obligation to comment.
I’ve a couple of friends who, for personal reasons, have made their blogs private and therefore, although I can read them as a guest, have to check manually whether they’ve written a new post. It’s a bit of a nuisance, but they’re friends (one met, one not) so I don’t mind.
In short, I have the full post published on RSS, I prefer blogs that do so but I generally click through anyway so that I register on their stats, I comment regularly and I check if someone doesn’t register on a feed reader. I rather think I’m perfect, don’t you?
I have switched mine back to full recently but did go for a year or so on partial for a very specific reason.
I discovered that some people were “reblogging” my content and that of many others, and I objected to it. They argued that that’s what syndication is for. We had a bit of a back and forth and I instructed them to remove me.
Within hours of this public spat, several other bloggers suddenly switched to partial feeds and investigating further I discovered that they too had been ‘reblogged’ but had suddenly stopped being ‘reblogged’.
It made me feel vindicated, but a year or so later, I felt it was time to return to full feed.
Ah fair enough, Gert.
See, now *there* is a reason I can understand for doing it!
Another reason is if you have a habit of revealing embarrassing facts about yourself when drunk. A blogfriend of mine does that – he deletes or alters them next day but the full monty is already published in the feed reader. I should tell him, but it’s all too interesting…