Everyone needs to have a good, functioning RSS feed. Of course, everyone doesn’t. But assuming you do, one question keeps coming up – do you publish your entire post via news feed, or just a summary?
For a long time I was a part of the summary crowd, and the logic went like this: You want people to visit your site – see that sidebar you’ve worked so hard on, see the pictures, visit other parts of the site, and so on. The best way to do that is to publish a “teaser” – just put a title or the first few lines of each post in your news feed. Then people have to click over to the site to read the full post.
But I think I’ve finally come over to the other side. I really think it’s better to publish each full post in your feed. Why?
People are using news readers more and more, and they’re keeping track of more and more friends that have started blogging (not to mention news, cartoons, photo feeds, etc etc etc). With so much information, it’s convenient to use a news reader. It’s not convenient to have to click over to the site every time you want to scan a post. Many people won’t bother.
Listen, you can still encourage people to visit your site in other ways – talk about that neat thing on your sidebar, link to your contact page when you want people to email, link to the photo album. In fact, it would be best to remember that more and more people will be reading via news feed – keep that in mind as you write.
Check your settings and subscribe to your own feed so you can be sure of exactly what people are seeing. And remember to make people aware of your feed – talk about it and make sure you make it easy to subscribe.
Most of our bloggers here do follow this tip. However, here are a couple of posts on RSS: An older post at Missionary Geek on reading what you want to read, and a video on TheBellSite – RSS in plain English. I also wrote on my personal blog about RSS.
3 blogs with nicely displayed RSS feeds.
From top to bottom, disciplemexico.org, Asian Greenhouse and The Poulette Family.
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
As a user of a newsreader myself, I agree that the full feed option makes it more convenient for the subscriber to stay up to date.
I want to do what I can to make it easy for others to stay informed, which hopefully makes them more inclined to pray and take part in our ministry.
I’ll always concern myself with the look of our site, but from my perspective it’s more important to get the word out, than to force others to pay attention to your design.
(Oh Jim, BTW, congrats on your recent redesign of your own blog. Nice.)
Thanks for your comments!
Extending the number of posts on the main page has its pros and cons. You may find that if there were more, there would end up being more from the same blogs.
However, I do have a way of “rotating” which blogs have a better “chance” of appearing, and I think there has been a pretty good representation over the course of several months.
One thing I might consider is increasing the number of posts in the feed. I’ll consider that for sure.
I also keep finding excuses to mention various blogs in other places, on other pages and here in the blog.
Remember, this is a site that’s run in my spare time – which at the moment is not a lot of time at all! So things move slowly.
Hi Jim, like you used to I have tended to use the summary option but am reconsidering this. Your advise was helpful and has probably tipped the scales in favour of not using the summary option.
Great work you’re doing on this site, we really appreciate it.
One question, could you extend the ‘Recent Blog Entries’ from the current 12 so that more Blogs get to be featured? Thanks
Great informative post Jim, I totally agree with the full post in the feed. I came to that realization when I realized that I wasn’t always finishing the article by going to the authors page.
Thanks!