Apr 11 2007

Bloggers, don’t truncate your posts

Published by at 6:42 pm under China,General

I know a lot of bloggers like to post excerpts to their posts so people will click through to their blog and see their beautiful design and peruse their sidebar widgets — but if you are blogging on a service like wordpress.com — and that reader is inside of China, they aren’t going to be able to see your genius in its full glory, only through an aggregator.

So go full text (Derek Slater, I can’t read your post linking to me) and be assured that there is a way to get past the Great FireWall via an aggregator. (Wikipedia is another matter altogether). An excerpted post is just a tease.

[update: red-faced I just changed my syndication options from "summary" to "full text."]

14 responses so far

14 Responses to “Bloggers, don’t truncate your posts”

  1. # Smurfetteon 11 Apr 2007 at 8:14 pm

    I agree with you Dave, however you should note that your posts are actually truncated in Google Reader (FYI).
    Cheers, S

  2. # Tim Suppleson 11 Apr 2007 at 9:04 pm

    Amen brother!

  3. # Ryanon 12 Apr 2007 at 12:12 am

    You’re kidding right? You do realize YOUR RSS feed is truncated, don’t you? I had to click through to read this one.

    Seriously.

    Also, I hate people who put smileys in their posts to show they are not really pissed off.

    :-)

  4. # Ryanon 12 Apr 2007 at 12:39 pm

    I’m glad to get the full feed!

  5. # site adminon 12 Apr 2007 at 5:50 pm

    And I suspect you aren’t inside of China either…..
    Duh factor is huge here today in Churbuck-world.

  6. # Derek Slateron 13 Apr 2007 at 2:29 pm

    Serves you right for calling me out! [Insert here: something like a smiley face, only cooler.] Okay, I confess my relative ignorance of wordpress controls. Will tinker.

  7. # ps3mate » Blog Archive » Rick’s Ruminations: Full Feedson 19 Apr 2007 at 9:46 pm

    [...] David Churbuck’s recent post imploring bloggers to publish full feeds reminded me that I’ve been meaning to comment on this for a while. It’s a subject I speak on regularly at SES, and some of the recommendations I make are not the same ones you see made on a number of blogs. [...]

  8. # Internet Business Blog » Should You Use Partial Feeds To Increase Website Visitors?on 24 Apr 2007 at 2:33 am

    [...] One popular reasons given for using partial feeds as opposed to full feeds is that it increases website visitors. If you let people have your full feed they will just consume your content through a feed reader and never visit your site, so you have to offer just a partial feed so they will have to click through to your website and read your full post, right? … Wrong! Several recent posts say otherwise. Whenever I subscribe to a feed and find out it only offers a partial feed I unsubscribe immediately in almost all cases. On the rare occasion that I do stay subscribed I end up reading less of the content than I would have had they offered a full feed, simply because clicking through to a website is just an extra step that I am reluctant to take, because it takes me away from all the other good content in my feed reader provided by all the other blogs who let me subscribe to a full feed. There is a lot of good content out there and I am always looking for ways to sift through it all. By offering only a partial feed you are pretty much guaranteeing that I will place your content in the never return category. One exception to this is Aaron Wall’s SEOBook. He offers great content that I wouldn’t want to miss it, but his blog is the only exception. [...]

  9. # Rich Tatumon 26 Apr 2007 at 4:34 pm

    Don’t forget that not all feed readers will show you the full feed when the summary is present along with the full-feed CDATA info (at least, that’s how I understand it given my experience attempting to deliver a full feed).

    Further, WordPress 2.1 out of the box will attempt to truncate every feed item that uses the <!– more –> tag.

    The solution I found to resolve this issue and deliver true full-text feeds was to use the following plug-in:

    CompleteRSS 1.0 from NeoSmart Technologieshttp://neosmart.net/dl.php?id=2

    You may find other plug-ins that work similarly and YMMV. But it’s been a real boon for me!

    Regards,

    Rich
    BlogRodent

  10. # that canadian girl » Blog Archive » Full vs partial RSS feedson 28 Apr 2007 at 11:23 am

    [...] David Churbuck points out that full feeds are also beneficial to Chinese readers, who may be able to read the RSS excerpt but not read the full entry on wordpress.com, for example. [...]

  11. # Movie Library » Blog Archive Wiederkäuen Ricks: Volle Zufuhrenon 19 Sep 2007 at 9:17 pm

    [...] David Churbucks neuer Pfosten die anflehenden bloggers, zum der vollen Zufuhren zu veröffentlichen erinnerten mich, daß ich die Bedeutung gewesen bin, zum dieses für eine Weile zu kommentieren. Es ist ein Thema, das ich an regelmäßig an SES spreche, und einige der Empfehlungen ich bilde, sind nicht dieselben eine Sie gebildet auf einer Anzahl von blogs sehen. [...]

  12. # Test Blog » Rick’s Ruminations: Full Feedson 01 Oct 2007 at 10:46 am

    [...] David Churbuck’s recent post imploring bloggers to publish full feeds reminded me that I’ve been meaning to comment on this for a while. It’s a subject I speak on regularly at SES, and some of the recommendations I make are not the same ones you see made on a number of blogs. [...]

  13. # Rick’s Ruminations: Full Feeds | Gaming and Sports Betting Tipson 20 Oct 2007 at 4:10 am

    [...] David Churbuck’s recent post imploring bloggers to publish full feeds reminded me that I’ve been meaning to comment on this for a while. It’s a subject I speak on regularly at SES, and some of the recommendations I make are not the same ones you see made on a number of blogs. [...]

  14. # David Underhillon 20 Apr 2010 at 5:48 pm

    I was trying to figure out why the feeds weren’t full text. I’ve updated my syndication option now :) . Thanks David!

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