RSS Feed Excerpts May 2, 20:24

and

I just set my feed to display full entries instead of simply excerpts, if I’d realised that I had that option enabled sooner I would have gotten rid of it long ago. I find it to be an incredibly annoying and tacky way of boosting your stats. I just absolutely hate having to have to actually open a website in a new tab to get the full entry, it’s much nicer just reading it in my feed reader and making the decision whether or not to visit the site myself. I strongly suspect that it’s a sneaky attempt on the part of the blogger to entice comments and boost their stats and as such I make it a point to read only the blogs that sound really, really interesting from their excerpt (unless, of course, the blog is known for quality) and otherwise pass them by. They’ll be getting no visits or comments from me!

On average I have about 30-40 feeds a day when I first sign on, obviously opening 40 different tabs in any browser is a bad idea. Awesomely bad. Especially given that my computer is a massive pile of phail and can barely run Firefox, Photoshop, AIM, iTunes, Notepad++ and Filezilla at the same time! Because of the strain on my computer I try to avoid piling any more tabs onto the few dozen I typically have open when I start Firefox. Of course, I could open them one-by-one, wait for them to load, scan the most recent entries, open the ones I want to save in new tabs and repeat the process until my feedreader count reads empty. That’s not how I roll, though and I suspect that’s not how most people roll. At least that’s not what I’ve gathered from surverys and discussions on the forums and blogs I frequent. I think that most people open their feedreader and scan their feeds in it, after all, why open unnecessary tabs if you don’t have to?

So why do so many people have excerpts in their RSS feeds? You know, aside from the ones who don’t realise they’re annoying everyone and immediately scramble to fix it upon finding out that they’re guilty of it too. Ahem. It’s quite easy to fix, according to my installation of Wordpress 2.5 it’s possible to choose whether you wish to display an excerpt or a “Full Post” by going to Dashboard > Settings > Reading and choosing the option Full Text in the fourth box down. In Textpattern it’s Admin > Preferences > Advanced, choose “Syndicate article excerpt only?” and choose “No”.

As for me, well I apologize for the inconvenience on this site and on Internet Police, you should notice the change right away here and whenever we decide to update on IP.

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Edited because I apparently can’t speak English.

Yay for full entries! I hate excerpts myself. If you have a good entry and I read it in full in the RSS, I’ll still be clicking into your site to comment or view comments. It can work against people to write excerpts, as sometimes I’d just be too lazy to click to view the full entry (especially if the excerpt wasn’t particularly riveting).

#1 Belinda May 2, 22:10 Permalink

This was very nice surprise in my RSS-reader :) .

I think Belinda summed also my opinion pretty well. It’s quite likely that I rather visit the site if there’s full feed rather than just few lines.

#2 Hanna May 2, 22:35 Permalink

I don’t mind it when it’s on the blog, it’s when it’s in a feedreader that I really get annoyed. Also, excerpts are only acceptable in certain situations, such as the content is particularly long and or it contains several high res images to load. If you want to limit the number of posts that load on your page then keeping the top post completely open you can make the older entries excerpts (or in my case a list). I have it set up so I can seamlessly go between excerpts and full text with no muss, no fuss and no fiddling with the code, I’m sure that you could set up Wordpress to do the same (I just used if/else tags).

#3 Becky May 3, 00:02 Permalink

As far as I’m aware, the only times my posts show up as an excerpt is when it’s actually been placed behind a cut on my blog itself – and in those circumstances, that’s when it inevitably when it has a large number of images, and/or is an insanely long entry of babble.

I rarely click on anything in my feedreader that’s been excerpted – chances are, they posted the most ‘interesting’ part of the post as the excerpt, so it’s all downhill from there!

#4 Amanda May 3, 23:36 Permalink

I don’t THINK I have excerpts for my RSS feeds! runs off to check

#5 Holly May 4, 03:27 Permalink

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