Tuesday 8 November 2011

Full-length feed: love or hate?

I've been reading a few other blogs on which people have mentioned that people prefer the full article in their feed reader. rather than just a short section and requiring a click to take them to the full article

I personally prefer the short version as I have a lot of stuff in my reader and hate dragging down hundreds of full-length posts when I'm likely to only read a few here and there via the reader, but it seems that a lot of people prefer it the other way.

So.. as an experiment, I flipped it over to the other way a month ago - to see if anybody noticed and changes the way they read. My site's not exactly high volume (maybe 1200-1400 uniques in a month), so not sure if the changes are really that massive yet, and I guess we can see as time goes on. But I'm impatient, so I figured I'd just ask. I'll happily accede to the wishes of the majority...

So: do you love it? hate it? even notice a difference at all?

8 comments:

Dave Aronson said...

I prefer to get the whole article in the feed. Sometimes I load up all my RSS feeds on my iPad or netbook, and go somewhere where I won't have connectivity.

Craig Ambrose said...

I prefer the whole article in the feed, but it's your blog Taryn. :)

Taryn East said...

Thanks guys.

yep, it's my blog - but I tend not to read it myself via RSS feed - so I'm happy to have it either way. If it helps even just one person to have it full-length (and it seems there's at least two of you), then full-length it is. :)

Lucas Prim said...

I really prefer the whole article! Use feedly and stop caring about scrolling!

tea42 said...

I prefer short version. I skim read lots of stuff and only want to see the whole article if I am ore interested. And then I am happy to visit a site.

You could always offer two different feeds btw.

Taryn East said...

I'm using blogger - and the settings only allow me to provide one or the other...

Unknown said...

I'm slowly catching up on my feeds (hence the delay). I love full content in feeds. I prefer reading in my feed reader as the experience is generally much more pleasant (less crap on the screen, higher contrast text in my preferred typeface and font size, no network connection required).

Taryn East said...

Hi @Jason - better late than never :)

These are some very good reasons. Thanks for sharing them.