GODDAMNIT PEOPLE!!

[miss_s_b]

Remember this rant about truncated feeds? Since I posted it, the award-winning Alix Mortimer has STARTED truncating! FFS! Still, it's better than Paul Walter and Five Chinese Crackers. You just get a bare url from THEM in the feed. Well, this is your warning, you three. Either institute proper feeds, or next Monday, when I do my Monday inbox clearout and checking of feeds, I'll remove you from my reading lists.

Don't think I don't mean it.

Comments

[strangefrontier]

Do a poll to see the split of liking/disliking truncated feeds is! I prefer truncated feeds to full uncut ones or bare links.

[miss_s_b]

I just won't even bother clicking through to a bare link.

There is research that shows that truncated feeds reduce your readership significantly, but I don't have it to hand. Mat knows them better than me, anyway. I just detest them.

[strangefrontier]

It probably does when people use feed readers, they'll want the whole thing. I prefer truncated ones on LJ as they're kinda equivalent to long posts under a cut.

[miss_s_b]

It depends HOW truncated they are. The ones where it's 50 words? That's not enough to give you the feel of a post! And it's not considered like an LJ cut.

[matgb]

I used to prefer shortened feeds, but Blogger has an option to turn all content off, you just get a title. Given that most people can't write titles for shit, that tells you nothing.

Wordpress gives the option of exerpts (it's actually close to supporting full cuts from what I've seen of the code) but most don't use them properly, so you get very short partial feeds.

SB prefers to read stuff on her reading page because the colour scheme hurts her eyes less—lots of research shows full feeds are a bonus to the readers, it's one of the reasons Teh Grauniad switched to them having been running partials for years.

(I'm considering setting up a 'feeds I read' Twitter account and porting everything I want partial through twitterfeed. Or possibly playing around with Yahoo Pipes, but I'll likely keep to DW).

I definitely like it that some of the feeds that were truncated on LJ aren't on DW, I've no idea why or how that's happening.

[strangefrontier]

Guess I'm in the minority for this one with my weird preferences!

I've got the opposite eye-hurty problem to SB (can't read light text on a dark backgroud for long) but far more blogs use a colour scheme that suits me than one that suits SB. Do either of you have the Stylish add-on for firefox? Change CSS on the fly - I've got a basic style overlay set up so I can force black-text-white-background on any sites, which is helpful.

[karohemd]

I'm really pissed off with the dpreview feeds that always have some Irreparable invalid markup error. :o(
Truncated feeds (like kayotickitchen or norecipes) don't bother me too much.

asquith

[(Anonymous)]

Have any of them defended themselves, like? In the interests of fairness & so on.

Re: asquith

[miss_s_b]

This is their opportunity, if they so desire.

The traditional defence for using truncated feeds is that people want to track their readers. To which my response is: put a tracking bug in, and then you won't LOSE readers.

Re: asquith

[andrewhickey.info]

Even wordpress.com's crappy stats let you see how many people are reading your posts through feed-readers, syndication etc...

Re: asquith

[andrewducker]

How well does that work when a third-party site like Google Reader pulls in your RSS feed once and then 500 people read it there?

Re: asquith

[andrewhickey.info]

It seems fairly accurate to me. For example I did a one-line post last night about 9ish just explaining why I haven't blogged for a while. According to my stats, 15 people read it on-site last night and 11 this morning, but it had 49 'syndicated views' last night and 28 this morning, which sounds reasonable given the numbers of people who read the site in Google Reader, the number of people with my blog on their LJ friends and so forth, and the amount of time (approx 14 hours) it's been up.

For all my larger, proper posts, I get a massive spike on the first day from syndicated readers (people tend to not read things labelled stuff like 'I Aten't Dead' or so on) and that drops down to nothing over the next two or three days, while the number of readers on the page stays fairly constant throughout time, which is consistent with all/most my regular readers doing so through feeds and keeping fairly up to date, while the people actually hitting the site are getting individual articles via links/Google etc.

Re: asquith

[andrewducker]

I wonder how it does it - possibly with images and referrer info.