One Man's Blog

Specialization is for Insects.

Home / Site Updates / Notice Anything New About Subscriptions?

Notice Anything New About Subscriptions?

John P.

By

So, did anyone notice that I turned on the full feed for RSS and e-mail subscriptions? Now you see the entire article in your e-mail or RSS reader.

I’d love to hear feedback about this change because I honestly don’t know if you guys wanted that or not. I’ve been told by some people that they don’t want to get long articles in their e-mail. But I’ve had other people request a full feed.

So, now that I did it I’d like to know what you think about it so I can decide if I should leave it on, or go back to just an excerpt. Here are a couple of my own observations:

  • In Outlook, my e-mail update doesn’t download the pictures or videos in the post. They just look like broken links or something. That is kind of annoying.
  • In Google Reader, the entire post is visible including videos and images.

That’s all I know at the moment, so please get back to me on this one.

Comments

  1. Hi John,

    I just checked and the service was not active, so I’m really confused. I’ve never had it active on any feed.

  2. Joe,

    Since you are redirecting your feed through FeedBurner you need to disable their Summary Burner option under the Optimize tab. I believe yours must be set to cut off around 200 characters or something.

    Let me know if that works for you!

    John

  3. Hi John, I really like full feeds, but I can’t seem to get them to work when I’m using your theme! I’m not using the tag so I’m really confused as to why I only get the first few lines on my feed reader. Could you possibly help?

  4. I believe a Full Feeds RSS is the thing to have? Why? Cause you don’t want to force your readers to come by your site whenever they find out that you wrote something cool. That’s why it’s OK to let them read the materials from the RSS aggregate (as it’s a full feed, they can even do this offline), and then, if they have something to comment on, be sure they’ll stop by.

    On the other hand, like Lisa said above, i also like to scan the headlines and see if something interesting pops out, but just a headline with no picture is not that appealing.

    So i guess it’s hard to satisfy all your readers, but i do believe you’ve made the right choice here

  5. Yours is one of my few email subscriptions, and I do that, like you mentioned recently, to remind me to visit my favorite blogs. (Yes, my packrat-ism has leaked into my reader, too!) And so I very much enjoy opening the email, reading the headlines, and popping over to read. It’s like, “Oh, what are we gonna talk about today at John’s blog?”, I say in anticipation. I scan the headlines, don’t really even read the excerpts, and pop on in here!

    So – I’m an excerpt kinda gal! For my email subscriptions, only.

    The court is still in session on the feeder.

  7. I definitely enjoy the full feeds. Thanks for doing that! I enjoy being able to read it all from one place instead of having to click through, but I still think that I comment a fair amount even if there is a full feed.

  8. I recently enabled full feeds again as well. I agree that for email subscribers it might be less enjoyable to read (I tried to find ways to keep emails excerpts, but no luck). But overall I think it provides a better experience for subscribers. I like full feeds.

  10. Does not make a difference to me as the feed is subscribed on google homepage. i like it that way, checking out on google homepage and visit the site, for all my feeds subscription.

    Yes most of the seo experts recommend full feeds. For my blog it was full feed, than i noticed that some web pages of higher pr than my blog where stealing the feed. Don’t know how? Result they were eating up the search results from my posts. So had to cut down. Those stealing sites still have the full feeds for the old posts, but about 100 words for new posts.

    All the trusted sites, with the feeds have just hundred words for all the posts, old or new.

    i noticed few subscription cut down after cutting down the full feeds to few words. Well i have no other options !!!

  11. Full feeds / excerpt feed, no difference to me, I prefer looking at the website and we will still have to come back to the site to read comments :)

    Best regards,
    Kim

  13. Thanks for turning on the entire feed.

    A few months ago I read an article on blogging, and it addressed RSS feeds and why one should publish the entire feed and not just an excerpt. Unfortunately, I can’t remember where I found the article. It found that site traffic was increased by publishing the entire feed instead of just a simple excerpt.

    In my own experience, sites which only publish an excerpt make more work for me and defeat the purpose of having the RSS feed in the first place. If I have to click a link to read the entire post, why do I bother subscribing to the feed? To me, there’s no difference between an excerpt feed and visiting the site directly.