On Providing Full RSS Feeds

February 23, 2006 on 12:22 pm | In Etc... |

Performancing have written about Why Full Text Feeds are Good - having been inspired by Scobles post explaining why Blog Herald not understanding why full text feeds work. I won’t summarize their opinions - go and read the posts for yourselves to be better informed. Pay special attention about what Scoble has to say about influencing connectors and journalists.

However, I will add my opinions about truncated RSS feeds:

They look really ugly. And they usually don’t mean anything because they are often just a part-sentence.
If I subscribe to your truncated feed, then I am probably only going to read about 15% of your website and be less convinced to subscribe to the products and services you are offering. Even if you are on the A List of blogging.
To get me to your website, you are going to have to convince me in 1 Post Title, 50 words and 3 full stops [in square brackets].

And here’s what I think you should consider doing if you have convinced yourself that you really MUST have truncated feeds (at least if you use Wordpress):

Impliment the Wordpress Better Feed plugin. Then you can enable readers to make a more informed choice about being forced to view your website. Also, you can configure it to show links to your products and services at the end of the feed item should you want to.

What are your opinions about not having Full Feeds vs Truncated Feeds?

15 Comments »

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Dominic, we’ve both blogged about the same issue today. I appreciate your thoughts on the subject of full vs. partial feeds.

While I can see benefits and drawbacks to both sides, I am sticking to partial feeds for now because, like many others, I am wary of having my content stolen and worried about possibly poor RSS ad performance.

I’d love to go to full feeds with appropriate ads inserted, and I’d prefer to offer my readers the ultimate choice between partial and full feeds (some actually prefer partial - it’s faster to scan through post headlines that way, for example).

Do you know of any tools that would make these alternatives easy?

Nice visiting here for the first time.

Comment by Easton Ellsworth — February 23, 2006 #
Easton,
If you use the Better Feed Wordpress plugin, then you can truncate your feed with the <!–more–> tag. This then places a ‘read more…’ (or whatever you specify) link into the end of the feed to direct readers to the website.
You can also customise the additional text at the end of each feed item. If you look at my feed, you will notice links to technorati, del.icio.us, categories, etc…
My main argument is how awful truncated feeds look and how ineffective they can be. With the Better Feed plugin, you can at least get some kind of message into your truncated feeds and a hyperlink to your website.

Comment by Dominic — February 23, 2006 #
Thanks Dominic.

Comment by Easton Ellsworth — February 23, 2006 #
[…] This is great news for me as I have posted before what I think about truncated RSS feeds and ProBlogger is one of the few sites where the content has so much value that I have to click through to the full post. […]

Pingback by ProBlogger enables full RSS Feeds &middot Accidental Entrepreneur : Dominic Foster — April 20, 2006 #
Definitely in favor of full feeds! Check out http://www.fullfeeds.com/

Comment by Lee — October 1, 2006 #
Yep…

Reboot America.
…

Trackback by Abigail — November 2, 2006 #
Look good…

0 and 1. Now what could be so hard about that?
…

Trackback by Matthew — November 24, 2006 #
width usage was growing faster than MSDN’s ability to pay for, or keep up with, the bandwidth. Terrabytes of bandwidth were being used up by RSS.

Comment by david law — January 27, 2007 #
I dont know but why i don find such informative and profitable blogs so often,I suspect blogging world is becoming so small that we cant find such lucrative blogs like this one.

Comment by leo — February 22, 2007 #
I suspect that’s thereason general public want to read blog….Internet visitors generally create blogs to declare themselves or their secret views. Blog grant them same matter on the monitor screen what they specifically needed,so as the above stuffs declared it.

Comment by Alisya — March 3, 2007 #
If Microsoft is unable (or more likely unwilling) to pay for this problem associated with massive feed consumption, then how many other companies will?

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Comment by Beyonce Eva — April 19, 2007 #
I suspect that’s thereason general public want to read blog….Internet visitors generally create blogs to declare themselves or their secret views. Blog grant them same matter on the monitor screen what they specifically needed,so as the above stuffs declared it.I think its dosnt matter u must think abt this.

Comment by Alisya — April 21, 2007 #