Switching back to real full feeds

Posted in Asides, Internet Duct Tape News, Technology by engtech on December 09, 2006

There’s always been a huge debate in blogging about whether to use full feeds or partial feeds. I *hate* partial feeds. They only display a fixed amount of text before the cut-off, and it is so unsatisfying to click more only to find out that you were missing two sentances. As a feed reader, I find I stop subscribing to partial feed sites unless I really like them. Currently I only read three partial feed sites:

and in all of those cases I don’t read them in my feed reader. I go visit the site, usually after I’ve read all my other feeds.

Where the hypocracy comes in: I realize that I’ve been using the READ MORE break too often. I wanted to only show one post per page on the main site to keep things manageable for readers to skim, but unfortunately it also impacts the feed readers.

So what I’ll be doing is leaving the full post up for a week, and then chopping it with the READ MORE break. (Unless the post is ridiculously long like some of the recent gift suggestion posts.)

And if you aren’t yet a subscriber, you can subscribe to my blog by click on this link: http://feeds.feedburner.com/engtech

11 comments

11 Responses

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Chris said, on December 09, 2006 at 3:58 am

So you’ll do that by hand? Lots of editing.

I appreciate your thoughtfulness on this issue, by the way. It’s one that’s been vexing me a while. My layout is a bit different — one full-text article at a time on the front page — but I have continued to make the last 10 stories available in full text via Feedburner. This will probably remain my practice, as I now have more RSS subscribers than site browsers.
engtech said, on December 09, 2006 at 5:09 am

Lots of hand editing, but nothing that much worse than what I normally do.

I edit posts all the time to fix the wording in some areas, add links, fix formating, etc. :)
raincoaster said, on December 09, 2006 at 4:29 pm

I only use a partial feed? Thanks for the heads up; I’ll switch it. I loathe the “read more” button for the same reason you don’t like partial feeds. It just looks like pimping for pageviews to me, and I am way too lazy to be bothered with that!
engtech said, on December 10, 2006 at 4:29 am

Yeah, I only put read more on posts that are waaaay too big.
The Rooster said, on December 10, 2006 at 10:48 am

Yey to full feeds! I hate partial feeds. Like you, if a blog is a partial feed it had better be good or have some other compelling reason to subscribe or else I don’t. As I have said before I spend a lot of time browsing the web from my FeedReader, I hate coming out for any reason. So… Thanks!

The CSS is looking good mate, nice work.
engtech said, on December 10, 2006 at 12:24 pm

Thanks!
jaybird said, on December 11, 2006 at 8:46 pm

yay!
Louis said, on December 28, 2006 at 8:47 am

By the way aren’t you guys using partial feeds? Well at least: http://beatsentropy.com/ is… care to fix that?
engtech said, on December 28, 2006 at 10:38 pm

They’re running full feeds, it put breaks in the post because they don’t want to overwhelm the front page.
mpb said, on January 03, 2007 at 11:42 am

I like full feeds and often click to read them on-line.

For example, I subscribe to //engtech Or so I thought but tonight the latest entry was
“Hello World! Welcome to WordPress.com. This is your first post. Edit or delete it and start blogging!” and it had nothing to do with cats.

I read through Great News. It picked up netli.wordpress instead. Any idea if this is Great News or WordPress or an in between problem? I hope the old feed returns.
engtech said, on January 03, 2007 at 6:04 pm

Hi mpb:

I checked the feeds in Google Reader and Firefox Sage and they all look ok.

Try subscribing to: http://feeds.feedburner.com/engtech

—

pure guess: netli.wordpress.com is a test blog by Barry. This might be the same Barry from Automattic, in which case they may have been testing something.