Quick Tips: Provide a full feed

TOTALLY agree!!!! I HATE partial feeds with a passion and I'm MORE likely to click through to the site to comment IF I have a full post to read.

Personally, I feel that partial feeds are offensive. It's like the blogger has decided that their content is more valuable to you as a reader than you are as a reader to them.

Gosh, I hope that makes sense. It's getting late.

It also gives me the feeling that they're more interested in MONEY or STATS (or both) than they are in their readers.

Whether that's the case or not, I think it's a big mistake to give that impression.

I also provide full feeds except on a couple of really long posts where the rest of the entry is waaay below the bottom of the page.. What I've started to do is run a part one and part two and link between the two entries to make sure they can read the whole thought that I'm trying to get out... Not always successful there either.. :-(

I've subscribed to both types of feeds to get the feel of things... Now, if I get a partial feed, I unsubscribe right away. I subscribed to the feed for the sole purpose of reading it in my reader, and I get a partial feed? No thanks.

Give me a reason to go to the site, like an interesting looking link back to an archived post or something. Or compelling content. That should do it.

If I did subscribe, I'd say I would hate that too. I'm pretty sure I have mine set to full though I didn't at first. An old friend of mine who was travelling sans laptop was the one to tell me about it (I was positive she was my only subscriber) and I changed it just for her!

Lightening - I've been trying to plough through the posts in Google Reader, and it's a lot harder to do that when I have to deal with partial feeds. I really want more people to provide full feeds! There ARE sites I continue to read that do it because I like the sites, but it really tests my patience.

Jeff - welcome. :) So you split the post into two separate posts? Or do you do one post with two pages? I have had some success with having a series of two or more posts, but it really depends on the readers. If your content is good enough, people will read it, but even the best posts might not get comments. I've had people telling me that they enjoy reading my content but they hardly comment at all, if ever. It's very hard to tell if people like your content if they don't comment, but I guess it's just a fact of blogging life. Most people do not comment.

Vincent - I usually avoid partial feeds unless the content is really good. I must admit though, I don't subscribe to sites if I don't like the content, so I do end up with a few partial feeds in Google Reader. Not out of preference, though.

fragileheart - We still need to chat about why you don't subscribe and the pros and cons. Fire me an email when you next get a moment! :)

Thanks for the comments. :)

Oh yeah, if I really like the content, I'd still live with partial feed. There's this author who writes like 1200 words on average per post. He splits it at about the halfway point. So his feed is partial, and you still get to read a large chunk of content.

The idea is that if the relatively large partial content was good, you'd go over and continue reading it at the site.

I'm not a feedie. I want the whole blog and nothing less. Blogger has an auto feed thing but I have not done a thing with it. I don't promote it or offer it.

I'm thinking of moving the whole blog and kitchen sink to my domain. Seems I should do something with it. Mainly I'm jealous of Lady Banana who has her own domain with the UK address. Mine is Canadian and I'm a proud and good little (well usually good and not so little) Canuck. I'd like to see my .ca domain be famous and... well at least out of mothballs. Maybe you will post about that some time. The regional domains and why don't those in the US use them? Seems odd to me that the US is so much about patriotism yet they let their commercialism over rule their choice of domains, even personal sites.

I give full feeds for my own blog.

For a while, I had my feed reader set to only display summaries, which got me confused as to whether the actual blog gave a full feed; I've sorted that out, but I've noticed that some of the blogs to which I subscribe do only give partial feed.
And I've realised that I get annoyed by that sometimes. Generally, I'll only click through if the article looks really interesting. There are a couple of blogs I subscribe to that I always end up clicking through to though.

One type of blog that I've found a partial feed to be useful with though is one I subscribe to with recipes. The dish is described in the first part of the post, and then the actual ingredients and instructions are in the part that has to be clicked to. That actually saves some clutter.

Vincent - that would work if the people who use partial feeds decided where to cut off the post in the feed. Usually it's just a very short excerpt that doesn't tell you much at all. The way I see it, a decent amount of content (whether full or partial but larger than a tiny excerpt) is a bonus for subscribing. Otherwise, why subscribe at all?

Laura - without a feed reader I probably wouldn't read as many sites as I do. Having your own domain is a good idea, although the suffix (.ca, .com etc) doesn't make a lot of difference unless you're actually providing a regional site. In my opinion the majority of "global" sites should use .com. There's a lot of inconsistency though - for instance there are several variations for the UK: there's .co.uk, .uk.com, .com.uk, .org.uk, .net.uk ... at least I think all of those exist. I never understood why a site might have a URL along the lines of www.mycompanyuk.com - as in, why does it have UK in the name itself? I might do a post about it, but to be honest there isn't a lot of point as people just seem to use what they can get. so if you wanted laura.com but couldn't get it, you might go to laura.net and so on. Spelling names with the full domain seems to be the "in thing" - such as del.icio.us, or ma.tt. I'd personally stick to .com.

Catherine - good point about partial feeds sometimes being relevant. It definitely depends on the type of site. Most of the sites I read are somehow related to blogging or technology and I just can't get on with partial feeds.

Thanks for the comments. :)

I did have mine set to the partial feed but after reading this post and the comments I have changed it to the full feed.

To be honest I had never thought of it as a bad thing, in fact I never really thought of it all!

Let's hope that changing it improves things. I have actually noticed that some subscribers have deleted the feed as my numbers fluctuate. Maybe the feed length is why!

Sarah - that's great, glad I influenced someone. :) Having read some comments from other bloggers, I think you're more likely to keep subscribers with a full feed. From time to time people may go through and remove a few feeds, and the partial feeds may well go before the full feeds do. It's best to maximise your chances of keeping subscribers once you get them. :)