Friday, February 10, 2012

Feed Reductions

I'm seeing a trend lately. More and more of the blogs in my feed for Google Reader are limiting how much information can be read there without going to the actual blog site to see the whole post. What a drag... The whole point of the reader is to pull it all together so I can read through a post in a single place, to avoid visiting hundreds of sites. I wish they weren't doing that. If I get annoyed enough I may just stop visiting altogether. Hmmm, that sounds like a threat. :) Don't know if it matters to them or not but it's a drag from this bloggers viewpoint.

8 comments:

cadalot said...

Steve

I would just like to say click here for more .......

Nick Borgmeyer said...

I've noticed the same thing. I've noticed in general if you use the atom feed (vs RSS) from a site, you usually get the whole post instead of the summary only. But of course this means you need to visit every feed you have setup in Google Reader and see if that blog has an atom feed.

Dimitri Harvalias said...

I can see it from both sides Steve. I love Flipboard and other readers on my iPad because it does allow me to consolidate feeds there. In addition to readers there are a growing number of web sites that are scouring blogs and grabbing whole posts for inclusion on their sites. Depending on the set up the web site or forum uses, the re-post may or may not include a link to the original author or even credit them, other than the post subject line. I think this is part of the issue from the perspective of the original blogger.
I'm no blog 'back of house' expert but wouldn't those who track stats for their blogs not know how many people have actually seen the post without traffic coming through their site?

Steve said...

Don't know I seem to get credit for people reading via readers. I don't limit how much of the post can show up in a reader. Some are doing that, more now than before. That means I have to click the link, go to their site, read and then return to the reader. Just take more time.

If I find that I do that enough and there is much more there to do it for, I may just drop that feed and visit the site once a month or so.

I can keep track of new posts for several hundred blogs in Reader, it's more time consuming to have to visit each site. whine whine whine...

If I were running ads on my page maybe I'd be more interested in people actually seeing it.

Dimitri Harvalias said...

I agree it can be a nuisance. My contention is that if you are accessing the blog via your reader then you have made the effort to subscribe to that feed so it's no different than actually visiting the blog directly.
If the post is being 'echoed' (to use your term) by a forum or web site then it shouldn't be re-posted in whole, it should just contain a brief description and a link to the original post (which is typically what you do when you echo).
Unfortunately I think it's an all or nothing situation in the RSS Publish settings of the originating blog.

Steve said...

My post isn't about "echo" sites, just primary blogs that have altered how much of their posts are "fed".

Spinnacre said...

I came all the way over here to the full site just to tell you I totally agree with you Steve. I'm glad to know I'm not the only one.

Anonymous said...

There is a Chrome extension 'Super Full Feeds for Google Reader' that works on most of the truncated blog posts I encounter.