Mar 09 2007 at 9:39pm
Full or Partial RSS Feeds?
I am considering using a wordpress plugin that would help me track my feeds. This plugin only offers full text RSS feeds. I’ve been a little wary of full text because I’ve heard about problems with people scraping content. There is a further discussion of this problem here and here.
I’m not quite sure what I want to do about this. I know I do want to do something different with the feed. It’s pretty crappy right now - all it has is a broken-off piece of the first paragraph and a bare url link to the post. Not so nice.
What do you think? Would you like it if I had a full text feed instead? I can’t imagine there are more than 3 people subscribed to my feed (pathetic, isn’t it?) , but I still want to make you happy :) It sounds like most people on other sites prefer full feeds. I tend to prefer partial sometimes, just because I like going to the site and I tend not to when there’s a full feed. On the other hand, there is a lot of content I would probably never read if the authors didn’t offer a full text feed.
I am starting to come around to offering a full text feed istead of partial. What I need now is more people reading (and linking to!) my content, not any side benefits that might come from visitng the actual site. I don’t have any advertsing here anyway so I’m not bothered about that.
By the way, if you know of any other good RSS plugins for Wordpress please let me know.
Adam H March 9th, 2007 at 11:57 pm
WordPress 2.1 now gives partial text if you use the <!–more–> tag in your posts where it used to give full text all the time. I use Google Reader for feed reading but almost never look at the feed text, I prefer to go to the actual site to see the design and layout.
As we move forward in the blogosphere the production value of each post is improving. For example both Jeff Croft and Garrett Dimon put effort into each posts image layout which really adds to the experience. The only time I look at the feed text is if a site is down when I want to read it. However, I suspect I am in the extreme minority.
Fredrik Rubensson March 10th, 2007 at 9:26 am
I browse most posts at Bloglines (where there are 4 subscribers to this excellent blog by the way…) so I would really like a full feed. Now I go here anyway because I found it a couple of weeks ago (the newness thing) and really like the content.
I don’t understand the scraping thing – isn’t it just as easy to follow the link in the feed and get the content directly from the site? (Assuming a bot is doing the work….)
Megan March 10th, 2007 at 11:27 am
Hey, guys, thanks for your feedback! I’m glad you’re enjoying my posts, Fredrik. I don’t quite understand the scraping thing either. I guess the syndication just makes it easier for people to replubish your content.
Adam – that’s a good point about better styling of pages. I remember reading that at Jeff Croft. I do a lot with individual pages on my work site but not so much here. I just found a plugin that allows you to add extra stuff to the <head>, which will make it easier to do some custom CSS for individual posts (rather than going into the templates… although it would be good to have some basic classes available there too).
I have heard of some people who will unsubscribe from a feed if it doesn’t offer full text and I definitely want to avoid that.