Monday, May 25, 2009

Full feeds or summarized feeds?

RSS feeds is a popular way for people to keep track of blogs or sites without having to visit them regularly. It’s like an e-mail inbox where all unread posts of your usually visited sites are delivered.

One of the usual decision that you have to make when setting up RSS feeds for your site is whether to enable the summarize view or not. Here are some things you may want to consider before deciding what type of view to use:

Summarized:

  • Subscribers won’t be spammed if your post is quite long
  • Perfect if your posts usually contain a lot of pictures
  • Guaranteed visits when your reader got curious. Use this if your first few sentences are really catchy.
  • Might turn off other people who won’t bother reading the whole post

Full:

  • People don’t have to visit your site to read the whole post which is nice if your site takes too long to load.
  • It’s easier for people to get hooked to the post
  • When a person visits your site from a full feed, it’s usually a sure way to get comments
  • If your posts have lots of hi-res photos it will be a turn off for those with slow connection

Conclusion:

So what do I suggest? I enjoy reading full feeds than summarized. I’d rather read every post on my reader than to click them one by one to see the whole thing. If I’m going to click on a post it’s because I want to comment on it. Besides, the summarized view doesn’t look good since you’ll see all first hundred of words in one block of text.

What’s your take?

No comments:

Post a Comment

Blog Widget by LinkWithin