Torontoist.com, a very good Toronto-centric blogging site (part of the Gothamist network) has moved from a full RSS feed to a partial feed over the past few years, and from a partial feed to a tiny-imaged, short-excerpt RSS feed as of Christmas this year. I hate this, and did my part as a good and loyal reader to inform the editors of my displeasure. They said that they understood and it wasn’t under their control and thank you for reading. Nice, professional, I bear them no ill-will, but it doesn’t really solve my problem.
BlogTo.com, their close competitor, offers a full feed of many of their articles, full-sized photos, and excerpts feature articles after 2 or 3 paragraphs. Enough to get me reading, and deciding whether or not I’m enjoying the piece. Big enough pictures to make me notice. In short, it is well designed.
I don’t mean to bring this up to slam Torontoist, it’s a great site and I enjoy reading it, but I subscribe to a few hundred websites, about 600 new articles a day appear in my RSS feed, and I try to read and enjoy appreciate anything that looks interesting. And so when going through my RSS feed, the image to the right depicts a BlogTo article in my feed (top), followed by a Torontoist article in my feed (bottom).
Which one of those articles, as displayed, makes you want to keep reading? Which one of those articles would have you clicking over to the main site, which would then get the attendant ad-traffic, viewership, etc.?
Both sites have been very good to me and I hesitate to openly criticize one, but I think this is what parents call a “teachable moment.” If you are running a website, ask yourself if you’ve got a full or partial RSS feed, and how your site is displayed, and whether it’s inviting and open and promotes your message, promotes What You’re Trying To Communicate, or if it… doesn’t.
And if you don’t know? Find out!
– Christopher
Several of the feed I read have done this – I don’t know enough about Web traffic calculating – but I wondered if this has something to do with getting people to click though to visit the actual Web site.
I’m an avid RSS skimmer–practically an addict! I get why sites choose to limit their RSS content, it’s to get reader onto their site to read the rest. I don’t like it, but I get it.
Where feeds fail is when they have partial posts, yet don’t write their initial content with the intent on drawing users to their site.
What doesn’t make sense to me is why add all the share links in the feed as well? The feed is partial, but they want people to share it anyway? For all the effort of adding share features, they could have put in ads instead.
I generally unsubscribe from any feed that doesn’t present the full post. I just don’t have the time for their game playing.
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10869529/212.JPG
Ummm…
Steve, are you subscribed to https://comics212.net/feed ? I see the full article.
Steve – Yeah, no idea what you’re subscribed to buddy. I’ve got all the settings to full-feed. If you can let me know what your subscription is pointing to, I’ll try to address the issue.
https://comics212.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/comics212rss.jpg
This is a pet peeve of mine also.
I prefer long previews or full articles also, though like others said, I understand that that point is to get readers to click-through and read at the site rather than in the reader. But from my perspective, that doesn’t make it any less annoying.
By far, the worst RSS feed I’ve ever encountered is for The Comics Reporter. I’ve brought this up to Tom before and he put me in touch with whoever handles it. They tried to fix it, but eventually gave up. The posts show up as a ginormous block of text – no formatting, no line breaks, no links, no images, nothing! It’s totally absurd. And it means that 90% of the time, I skip over it completely and don’t bother reading more than the headline.
Which is a real shame, because it’s one of the best sites I follow. But I follow over 100 comics sites and I read the ones that grab my attention.
(Also, I can confirm that I see the full posts for this blog’s feed.)
According to Google Reader, it’s https://comics212.net/feed/rss/
I think I got it when I entered “comic212.net” into their subscribe field when I was setting up google reader. I’ll change it now.