Saturday, July 07, 2007

Partial or full RSS feeds?

This week Ariane changed her blog set-up and started publishing full feeds instead of partial feeds.

Now I can’t comment on Typepad blogs 95% of the time so I didn’t leave a comment but I made sure to email her and tell her THANK YOU! I’m sure she thought I was a raving lunatic.

Why should you publish a full feed?

Most people are busy and only have a certain amount of time to blog surf.

I am one of those people :-) and if I am pressed for time like I am most days, I only read the partial feeds from my Google Reader and I don’t click through to read the full feed unless I am absolutely dying to read the rest of it (mostly I don’t).

I also only click through onto a blog (even when the full feed is published) if I want to comment. I read somewhere that less than 10% of people comment and based on my own experience, I think this could be true.

When I was setting up my blogs, I chose to publish full feeds because I figured that I would rather people read what I’m writing and not comment (although those are very, very welcome and much, much appreciated) than skip ¾ of my writing through a partial feed.

I’d say that although I always click through on some blogs, I only do so for about 10% of the blogs in my Google Reader.



So what do you think?

  1. Do you publish a full or partial feed?
  2. How did you decide?
  3. What % of the time do you click through to read the rest of someone’s partial feed?

Is anyone else having a problem with blogger where it doesn't want to let you put your cursor in the title field to type a heading? If yes, please tell me how you fixed it. Thanks!!!

8 comments:

tknoppe said...

I publish a full feed and also use google as my home page and reader to save me time. I have a few site that I click through and leave comments, but again, time prevents me from doing so on all blogs I may read. Usually less than 5% of blogs I read do I ever leave comment. ~Traci

Military Mommy said...

Hmmm. Good question. I think I publish a full feed. If I don't please tell me so I can fix it, though I'm not sure I even know how. : ) Computer illiterated unite!

I click through on all of the blogs I read. But I narrowed my bloglines down to about 30 feeds, so that made it much easier! : )

Annie said...

I don't know about the rss stuff Marcia, but the header thing I just go ahead and type my post and then it lets me go back and add the header. Weird huh?
I'm so glad you got your package!
♥, annie

Anonymous said...

I subscribe to ~100 sites with google reader and I find sites which do not have full feed irritating and frequently unsubscribe from them.

I will go to the site if I want to leave a comment, view comments already left (Feedburner footer which shows the number of comments is very useful to tempt me in) or if there are links to previous posts which take my interest.

As I personally don't like partial feeds I use a full feed for my site.

Unknown said...

I'm a full feeder. I may not always eat everything on my plate, but in the blog world I do the full feeds. hmm, maybe that is what happened to my bum!

I also have iGoogle for my home page with the Google Reader in my Blog tab so I can scroll through, read the blogs and only go the actual post if I want to comment.

It saves me time and when my brain needs to take a break it is a quick and easy way to have a 3 minute brain fluff.

Although, I do have less than 20 blogs in my Reader and of those 7 post regularly. So, my life is pretty easy!

I'm not having problems with the titles, but your blog has been taking a long to load lately. At least on my end it does. :)

Multi-tasking Mommy said...

Although I can totally appreciate why people would prefer full feeds to be set, I personally choose partial for one reason only.....

When I first started blogging and was publishing full feeds, honestly because I didn't even know what a feed was at the time and that was the default setting....I digress.....some of my content was stolen.

When one chooses to post full feeds, they can very easily be taken and posted elsewhere.

This is why I choose partial.

Robyn said...

I went so far as to make a folder in my google reader called extended viewing. I hardly ever check that folder.

I just started my blog this past week. I such a newbie to hosting a blog that I'm not sure how to even get the feed. BUT I know that when I do I want it to be a FULL feed that is sent to google reader..LOL

Ok, I think I figured out how to add a feed. I hope I publish a full feed...LOL

So many things to learn about blogging.

Anonymous said...

Thanks for linking to me! I totally agree, I prefer the full feed and then I click through to comment.

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