Is a New RSS Entry Enough To Make You Visit?
Anybody who looked at the RSS feed I linked to on Monday might have seen the article called Full Or Partial RSS Feeds - The Great Feed Debate. This links me nicely to what I wanted to talk about today.
If you read this site via RSS you've no doubt noticed the lack of any content in the feed at all, apart from the title that is. This is partly because of my decision to do so and partly down to technological limitations.
My decision to do this is partly because of personal preference and partly because I am too lazy (or often forget) to add anything in the "summary" field for each blog entry.
As I use it, the summary field acts as the RSS description, which is meant to tempt you in to read the rest of the entry without having to leave your feed reader. Ideally this summary field, which should be either the full or partial content of the blog itself would be automatically set by the CMS. In my case it's Notes, obviously, but I've never found a reliable way of doing so.
The body of each blog is a simple text field. However, in my opinion, Notes is unable to manipulate strings from well enough to do the equivalent of the htmlspecialchars() function in PHP. Or maybe it can and I just need to learn how?
Even without getting in to the whole full/partial argument the first hurdle in providing anything useful to readers is being able to do so.
Before I look further in to the hows I wanted to know what you guys actually want. Full content, partial content or merely a sentence from me that explains the title in more detail. Maybe the title itself is enough?
Call me big-headed but I've always assumed that my content is so worthy of a read that new RSS items in my feed act merely as a big red beacon letting you know to come on over. Maybe this was the case when there weren't a myriad other Domino blogs. What about now? Do you need something more persuasive than an ambiguous title? Do you ever skip reading an entry here as the title doesn't do it for you?
My objective here to is increase visitor number. I spend a lot of time on the content, so want to make sure as many people get to see it as possible.
Skip to the 
You can subscribe to an individual
I use Google Reader in iGoogle, so I don't see anything but the title and blog name. Since I usually want to read the blogs in my blog list, I will at least take a look at the blog posting, no matter what the title says.
I use Google Reader in iGoogle but generally launch to a full screen version of Google Reader at least once per day. You can see details in the full screen version.
That said, the whole point of an RSS reader is to enable you to scan through the subject headings and ignore the ones which don't readily appeal.
I get around 300 RSS Entries per day on a wide variety of topics. If the subject doesn't grab me, then the topic won't get read - it's as simple as that.
BTW: I guessed (correctly) what this post would be about and was interested - hence the visit.
I use NetVibes for all my feeds. Some RSS feeds offer the full details, so I see them in the NetVibes page. Others (this one) only offer the Title. So I set that feed to open in a new window when I click it.
I've seen other feeds that have a mixture of the two. They offer a cut down feed, with small pictures, but link to the full article with full size images.
But thats not the point. I think it more to do with how useful the page is and what the hoster wants. If they have ad driven content then of course they want you to come to their page. If it's just snippets of content then you can download all the feeds and read them offline if needs be.
But as for Domino stripping and sanitising characters then there is still a lot of work that needs doing. In XML you cannot have characters less than char(32) or greater than char(127). @Ascii is useless as it simply strip the offending character - what we need is a way of encoding it so that it won't barf on the humble pound sign (£). And it gets worse with European languages with accents, umlauts etc.
I've tried using CDATA declarations but to no avail (other than allowing embedded HTML). There is still no way of encoding all the extended characters that I have found.
I use Bloglines. The only site I read without a summary is yours and I make the exception because historically the content of your site has always been newsworthy.
As a rule, if a site doesn't include at least a partial summary in the RSS feed, I usually drop it from my blog list. As you've said, their are hundreds of Domino sites, not to mention others, and one of the advantages of a blog reader is to save you the hassle of going to each and every site. To me, if a site won't go to the trouble of putting a summary in the feed, it ain't worth my time to read.
I would vote for you to put the whole content in the RSS feed.
Keep up the good work.
I use Google reader in full screen and am less likely to read the entry if it is just a heading - I would be more likely to read the entry if it had at least some teaser info ;o)
I would vote for you to put the whole content in the RSS feed, too.
Regular visitors know your content is worthy, but I would think if you're looking to add visitors, you'd best allow them to read you in their feedreaders so they'll get hooked. Otherwise, how will they know what you have to offer?
I remember you discussing this before, and understand your wanting to have people visit the site itself. While I like to see full content posts via RSS, I still often find myself visiting the sites often to read the comments along with the post.
I do also like viewing blogs with their intended design rather than the sterilised look of a feedreader (FeedDemon in my case).
Its up to you, but if you want my vote, I'd go for full content, but a summary would be better than just the title.
On the other hand, it hasn't stopped me visiting yet! ;-)
I am using the feed reader on my mobile phone a lot to check if there is any new entries that I should take a closer look into when I am at home/office. And therefore I would appreciate a summary.
Like others here I use Google Reader and I have to say that I prefer to see as much content as possible in the Feed Reader. The YUI blog feed does this {Link}
I think I remember you saying previously that you wanted people to come to your site so that they would get the full experience of the pages you have developed but, and I don't wish to hurt your feelings here, all I am interested in is your blog. The rest of the site is not as important.
However, I still follow the links to your postings so whatever path you decide to go down I will still be reading. (And it has just occurred to me that I've been reading for about 7 years give or take ....)
I too use Google Reader, and like Steve I read your articles based on your proven history.
That said, I'm all for the summary. It makes it easier to flag it as a 'read now' or 'read later' post. And if its a summary it will still drive traffic to the site.
Yours is the only blog without a summary (and most have full content) that I am subscribed to. And fortunately your subject lines are usually pretty descriptive, because I do use that to decide whether a post is going to be interesting or not. I agree with the others here - you're getting away with it because of your reputation, but as a general rule people avoid feeds that don't have useful content (in the feed itself).
I use Wizz RSS on Firefox. Sometimes (like with this post) I get the first paragraph or so. Sometimes I don't get anything (like with the Saving WQO post from a few days back). I usually come to the site to see the post and comment unless it seems something I'm clearly not interested in currently.
I use the Sage Firefox extension to browse through my RSS feeds. It uses a collapsible left sidebar (Alt+Z) to display the feeds I save in Firefox and you can even center click on the links to open them in new tabs. For most of my feeds (most of which have summaries) I hover the mouse over the links to popup (like a img tag alt attribute) the summaries first before clicking on them, but your site has had such consistently great content over the years that I click on your links regardless of what is in the summary or title.
I'd tease personally... but I'm curious - why *don't* you just include all of your content in the RSS feed? You're not running ads on the site, so it's not like you'll be missing out on anything really... just curious!
jake,
i read maybe 1/3 of your articles because i only click through if the title looks really interesting. this isn't just true of your feed, it is true of any feed that doesn't include the full text for the entry. our beloved vowe doesn't include all the text either - sometimes i click through, sometimes i don't.
so for me, full text in the feed is preferred. thanks for asking. :-)
I'm a Google Reader user as well, so I prefer full content. Generally speaking, when I see a title from you (or something that looks intriguing from the BBC or any other summary-only feed) show up, I'll "both-click" it to open it in a new tab for later and finish reading the rest of what's new, then jump to the new tab to read your article. Trouble is, I often get interrupted by something else before I get a chance to check the other tabs, but by then it's already marked as read in the feed reader. So the page loaded, and your log indicates that I visited, but I never actually saw the full content.
In my opinion it's wise to learn from classic daily newspaper articles. It's common there to set a big fat title, a small fat teaser/summary, followed by the body.
For me, a newsfeed should provide the title and - if not the full content - at least a carefully worded teaser.
Jake,
I use Bloglines, and as other readers have noted, I too read only blogs that include a summary. Except for codestore due to the history you have built.
That being said, I find it annoying when it is simply a summary and not the entire content. If I am reading a longer summary and find I need to click through to the site to finish reading the article, then I get annoyed, mostly because I then have to find my place in the article on the blog...
If it is going to be a summary, then make it short and sweet and make me want to come to your site to read the whole article. Otherwise, push the whole article...
Call me old fashioned - I still check the actual site on a regular basis.
If you can't capture me in 3 or 4 lines I'm not going to read the article.
Jake, when the content is as consistently interesting as yours I'm sure most folks would (eventually) click through from their RSS reader even without an excerpt. However, when it comes to flagging posts for later followup (I use bloglines to "keep as new" or "clip" an entry), not having an excerpt is a real pain.
In fact, my ideal blog reader would be one in which I could do a full text search across the entire content of all my flagged posts. I don't know how I could ever do this "right" without full posts being available as RSS from all the blogs I read, but it would be hard to do at all without at least excerpts.
So, full posts would be ideal, but excerpts would be very helpful too if you insist.
hth
I don't like to leave my blog reader. I have to be REALLY tempted to take the extra effort to open the site (your site included). Often I'm REALLY tempted by a subject or short intro, and often I will skip if I don't know exactly what the title is offering me.
I think you could make it easier on yourself to not try and write a carefully constructed summary. Instead, just write the first paragraph and make that the block that shows in the summary. That's enough for me to decide there's quality there for me to read.
I read your blog just if the title really catch me and I really prefer at least few lines from article to have available. Full article is perfect as I usualy read it offline, so when I have just few lines there I have to flag it and look again on it when I'm connected.
@Jake, I'd vote for full content in the feed.
@Dragon, "In XML you cannot have characters less than char(32) or greater than char(127)"
Where on earth did you get that idea? You can have almost any unicode character in XML. Most control chars and surrogates are the only illegal chars. There are also rules about name chars and name start chars which are a much smaller set, but still includes all sorts of accented chars. You also need to escape & " ' > < in a serialised representation, but that's pretty trivial.
Jake, is there something you need that this doesn't do?
@ReplaceSubstring(text;"&":">":"<":"\"":"'";"&":">":"<":""":"'")
I would agree with several colleagues above ...
(1) Blogs are stickier if the RSS feed contains a decent amount of the content so that they're readable without visiting the site (I'm another bloglines person, if anybody cares)
(2) Your blog is a worthy exception because of your reputation, so I do generally make the effort to visit the site, BUT
(3) Nowithstanding (2), point (1) above still holds.
Julian
I use Feedreader - a standalone program - which allows me to manage my subscribed feeds "offline".
Therefore I like full content feed for two reasons:
- I can read the blog entry offline
- I can full-text search for blog entries
It just occurs now and than that I remember reading something about subject X in a blog, but can't remember in which (of the 70+). Even if X doesn't occur in the subject/header of the blog entry, I can find it, if the full-text article is in the feed.
Thomas
{Link}