Professor Bainbridge...on law, politics, religion, culture & food

Partial feeds are a really bad idea.

According to my google reader stats I’m reading over 13,000 items a month. I don’t have the time or inclination to click through to each entry. If everybody was using partial feeds it would be useless.

I realize that advertising income is needed to keep the defray the costs of running a blog but partial feeds are not the answer.

I think a better solution that other blogs are using is adding ads to each item in the feed.

Chris

I’m with Chris. Partial feeds suck. I tend to gradually stop reading blogs that use partial feeds because they interfere with how I use RSS—they stop me from quickly figuring out whether or not I want to read a post. If I go through ten different feeds smoothly and quickly and then the eleventh makes me feel like I’ve walked into a brick wall, chances are I’m not going to subscribe to it for more than a week or two.

In fact, looking through the 45 or so blogs I’m subscribed to, yours is (now) the only one that truncates posts this much. There are a couple that cut out after 1-2 paragraphs, which is almost always enough for me to decide whether or not to follow the link. The rest of them aren’t truncated at all. All of the other blogs I’ve followed that truncated this much have gradually dropped off the list because they eat up too much time.

Most of the mainstream news sites I subscribe to have truncated feeds. I’m still subscribed to them, but I almost never read them. The truncation makes RSS a bad interface. I’d rather read a newspaper.

Plenty of blogs and other sites with RSS feeds put ads into the feeds. Those ads are sometimes annoying. They aren’t anywhere near as annoying as partial feeds, though, and I’ve never stopped reading a blog because of the ads. Whatever advertising network you’re dealing with ought to be able to put ads into the feeds. If they can’t I think you’d be better off looking for someone else to work with.

--Charles

I hear you guys. Let me see what I can do. In the meanwhile, I’ve doubled the length of the excerpts.

Professor,

Thanks! Even making the excerpts longer helps.

--Charles