Truncated RSS feeds – do you care?

I recently switched my RSS feeds to publish a truncated version of each post rather than the whole thing. There has been some discussion of this on an unrelated post, but I’d prefer it if you used this post as the opportunity to express your views on this subject. Personally, I never got into using RSS feeds, and I’m open to your feedback on how this affects you.

7 comments to Truncated RSS feeds – do you care?

  • Truncated feed posts are designed to force the reader to go on your site rather than reading only your feed. Personnaly, truncated or not, I most often go to the original article in the hope I don’t miss anything… But I realise other might not so I publish my feed truncated…

  • crAsh

    I prefer to read full text of feed articles in Reader, and find truncated articles irritating. I will click thru if I have a comment or if there is clearly more elaborate material than Reader can display, but really if a truncated article doesn’t GRAB me, I am more likely to simply ignore it than to click thru. (and to be vaguely annoyed at the author.)

  • When I began my RSS feed I first used truncated feeds. But then I realized that the traffic to the site was not as important as having people read the content. I personally don’t mind a truncated post and then a click. But when I am on my phone a truncated post does limit my click trough. I think that is the case for most mobile readers like myself.

    For a site like this I think that a truncated post isn’t necessary. I click through b/c you have such a high rate of comment. That is the value add for the click through.

    Just my two cents.

    - KFD -

  • Interesting topic. I started out posting my topics fully to the feeds and then truncated them down. I personally prefer the truncated topics in reader. The ones that catch my eye I follow through. If they don’t catch my eye, I can skip on to the next one. In wordpress, the excerpt (if you create one) is posted in the feed rather then the first X words of the post. This seems to make sense to me as the first part of a post is usually a lead-in to the main topic whereas the excerpt can be a summary of the post.

  • I love my RSS Reader. I can watch and get mass amounts of information very easily. I can even chose what info I want to get. With RSS it all comes right to me. I don’t have to go looking for it. I provide my full posts in my feed. I find that when I go through my feeds, I often read the post on the site. I’ll open the post of the articles I want to read and read them throughout the day. I don’t think either method is the best, truncated or not. Reading habits will differ from user to user. The main point is that the information is shared. If they want to get to my site then great! If not, then I need to create better content to get them there. I found that I received more hits once I shared my full post. Maybe it was a coincidence.

  • I follow 77 work-related blogs in my RSS reader (Google). There are a few that I sometimes click through, but in general I just don’t have the time for more than a quick scan. I agree with Brian Hailey that an excerpt would be nice if it is to be truncated. Of course, I’m always glad when I click here because I forget about your polls, which I enjoy voting in. .-)

  • Joshua Taylor

    RSS Feeds are really very helpful and you could get site and news updates from it.`-~

Leave a Reply

 

 

 

Polls

Autodesk orphans, how well were you looked after?

View Results

Loading ... Loading ...

How good is Autodesk's customer focus?

View Results

Loading ... Loading ...

How good is Autodesk at the Internet?

View Results

Loading ... Loading ...

What is your relationship to Autodesk?

View Results

Loading ... Loading ...

Blog Statistics

  • Total Stats
    • 491 Posts
    • 551 Tags
    • 3,380 Comments
    • 1,081 Comment Posters
    • 69 Post Categories
http://www.blog.cadnauseam.com/2010/03/13/truncated-rss-feeds-do-you-care/
www.blog.cadnauseam.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2013-48
120936
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:TJ4ZZQ2IEO5GNAEIEDRPJNK2CYHBNVHO
<urn:uuid:588c27e4-16e5-4a09-907d-ba6be691c7c4>
2013-12-06T03:40:53Z
50.97.68.155
sha1:OEQCVLKU6QMEXSYQLTDWKYIXDLMTL4BS
<urn:uuid:2296041d-c8dc-4bb2-a392-fcdaeec84913>
http://www.blog.cadnauseam.com/2010/03/13/truncated-rss-feeds-do-you-care/
length
response
<urn:uuid:c5e37b51-1b14-4399-a32d-a7f79284f8b4>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-33-133-15.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2013-48
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web with URLs provided by Blekko for Winter 2013
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf