Summertime, and the living is geeky

The next couple of weeks are going to be rough. Just warning you now, just putting it out there like a PSA. Preschool ended for M on Friday, and there are three long weeks stretching out ahead of us until we hit the promised land of YMCA camp (which I'm so geeked for -- not simply because it'll give me a break from 24/7 childcare, but because I never went to anything like a day camp as a child... I'm bordering on jealous. Crafts! Popsicles! Running around like a crazy person in flip-flops all day! Man, that's The Life!). And judging from yesterday's trial-run of Stay-At-Home-Summer, the three weeks ahead look like something out of Laurence Of Arabia: arid, expansive, and bleak, smelling of sweat and sandy grit. I feel like I'm getting a case of the heat stroke just thinking about it.

This is a long way of saying that things might be a little light posting-wise around here for a spell. Light AND/OR lite, I guess. Of course, whenever I've said that in the past I've suddenly been struck by irrepressible inspiration, and ended up posting MORE than usual. But let's keep our expectations low, shall we?

. . . . .

Wholly unrelated to any of that (except perhaps L-I-T-E-ness), I feel compelled to pass the following nugget of wisdom on to my blogging brothers and sisters, gleaned from long years slaving in the blogging coal mines: Dudes, please stop with the partial RSS teaser-feeds. Please, I beg of you. Srsly. For my sake, but also your own.

And I say that as someone who tried out the partial feed life and followed that path for a good long year. And you know what? It killed my subscriptions. Because people are smart, and they were doing precisely what I now find myself doing when I subscribe to an RSS feed that turns out to be a partial one: clicking on the feed, scanning the sentence (or two, or three) provided, and then moving on to the next item in the feed reader. Oh and then after a month or so of doing that just going ahead and unsubscribing, having forgotten why I subscribed in the first place because I'm not being given anything of substance to engage with unless I jump through the contrived click-through hoop the author has fabricated. And again, speaking from personal experience from BOTH sides of that, I can guarantee you that most people aren't trained, hoop-jumping monkeys. Sad, I know.

I switched to a full feed about six or so months back, after having a partial feed for a year. Two important things I've since noted:

1. Absolutely ZERO reduction in my on-site traffic -- the thing I think most bloggers fear, which keeps them clutching at the partial feed as though it were some kind of page-impression life raft.

2. An enormous leap in my RSS subscriptions, which continue to grow at a staggering rate, ultimately meaning that more people are reading Sweetney than ever before.

And here's what I realized from all of this: I just want people to read my writing. Period. Maybe that sounds Pollyannaish, but it's the true bottomline. Do I want people to come to my site? Do I want people to comment on my site? Hells yeah. But more than anything I just want them to engage with me and my writing, and if they feel most comfortable doing that from the safety and comfort of their RSS reader, so be it. If they take the time to subscribe to my feed and insert me into their reading lives, I kind of owe it to them to let them decide if how and when they want to visit my actual place of web residence. Makes sense, right?

This subject is a hotly contested one I know, but because, as we're all painfully aware, I'm a complete and total web geek, I'm curious to hear your thoughts about this. Does it matter to *you* if a blog has a full or partial feed? Does it effect your decisions to subscribe/unsubscribe? Do you find yourself not keeping up with blogs that have partial feeds and becoming more involved with those that have full feeds? What say you, dear reader?