Hmm I’m talking about RSS/Atom feeds here. Ah wait, what is RSS you ask? RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, used by readers to subscribe to their favourite blogs and news sites. By subscribing to RSS feeds, we can skip visiting the actual websites to read its contents, thus saving our precious bandwidth on heavy loading sites such as nescagraff.com.
You can read for yourself here (RSS) and here (Atom).
Now if you are familiar with RSS reader (eg. Google Reader), surely you notice these two types of feeds: full and partial. Full feed here means you allow full content of your entry to be displayed in a RSS reader, while partial feed as the name suggests is restricted to few paragraphs or 200-300 characters. Meaning readers will have to visit the real blog to read the full entry.
I use Google Reader as my RSS reader. Yeah I admit I seldom visit real blogs to read entries, unless the content really intrigues me to go and click the link. I don’t have all the time in the world to visit the blogs I followed so by using a RSS reader I manage to escape the long time consuming site loading. Although by using one I’ll miss the nice warm feeling from the layout backgrounds, I always go for a visit whenever I have free time at night.
What irritate me the most is when the owners restrict their contents by choosing partial feed instead of a full one. Well to me being a blogger means to share your thoughts and ideas freely, in whatever mean, the readers will always come first.
Why should you limit the feeds? Are you that afraid of losing the page views? Afraid that your ads revenue will drop because readers won’t be visiting the real site anymore? If you are a good writer, people will surely drop a visit to leave their comments. Apa nak risau?
But if your sole purpose of writing blog is about making money, I suggest you should just focus on SEO sites. Recently I have seen some bloggers so desperately pulling visitors to their site by making entries about boobs, sex etc. Hunger for buffered ads?
I often read blogs while at outside using my handset, and I personally will not click sites that use partial feed. Leceh. Too much hassle. You may say by using partial feed, you can avoid plagiarism but to most of your followers, we don’t give a damn. We’re just interested with your content. So if you are still using such setting, please reconsider about this as you are about to loose one cute reader over here.
What’s your thought about this?
PS: For Blogspot users, you may check your feed setting at your Dashboard > Settings > Site Feed. At Allow Blog Feeds, choose between None, Short or Full feed.
