Sunday, March 20, 2011

Partial blog feeds.

I read a lot of blogs in Google Reader--usually more than I can keep up with.  I use Reader's tags function to sort and prioritize--Blogs I never want to miss, comics in their own section, etc.  I've started to read blogs from my phone.  Unsurprisingly the G2 "Google phone" works very well with Google Reader-there is a dedicated app that downloads batches of blogs, so even with a painfully slow or spotty network connection the next blog post pops up instantly.

...except when the authors decide to only do a partial feed, only showing the first paragraph or so in RSS, requiring you to click to their site to read the rest.  I can kind of understand this for commercial blogs--although a better alternative is to include ads in the RSS feed.  I can't understand why noncommercial blogs  do this.

This was a minor annoyance when I was reading exclusively on a computer--but with the limitations of a phone, makes most partial-feed blogs not worth the effort.  I've decided that the vast majority of partial feed blogs that I used to read are going to the end of the line, into a different folder.   I'll only read them in the very rare cases when I'm caught up with everyone else.  

(If you are using Blogger.com or Blogspot, fix this by going to Settings, site feed, and pick "Allow Blog Feeds Full")

3 comments:

  1. Some people do it to keep other sites from duplicating their content. I had content from a previous blog scraped from the feed. As for ads, they can be put in a feed as well.

    I do find partial feeds annoying, though. I'm not very likely to click through, that's for sure. Take a look at hotair.com's feed for an example of what not to do.

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  2. Wizard RSS is your friend. It is not perfect, and it is not quick, but it surely beats having to deal with partial feeds.

    That said, folks really do need to provide full feeds if they expect people to read their weblogs...

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  3. Thanks Linoge, that should help for the couple of partial-feed blogs I still want to read-but most of them I'm not going to bother with, since my problem is too many good blogs, rather than not enough.

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