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?

Comments

[NotAMeanGirl]

I HATE partial feeds. There, I've said it. I'm much less likely to click on your feed and go read the whole post. I only go to the actual website when I have something I wanna say in comments. Otherwise I'm a feed readin baby.

[Nic]

HATE partial feeds. HATE.

[foodmomiac]

I switched to full feeds a few months ago as well, and I noticed the same things. Increase in subscriptions, no decrease in site visits.

[Mandee]

Hate, hate, hate partial feeds. I'll usually keep a subscription, but I rarely click through to read the full entry.

[Fairly Odd Mother]

This is where I feel like a complete blogging idiot. I had no idea if I was a 'partial' or full feed so I had to subscribe to my own blog to check. Phew. I'm sure everyone is thrilled.

Even worse than a partial feed is when I only get the headline for the post. There isn't even any text to draw me into the site.

[unacoder]

i'm glad it's not just me. i hates me some partial feeds. i react the same way.

[kelsi]

full feeds all the way. especially since I read from work (shh, don't tell anyone).

[Paula]

I am a relatively new RSS user and I hate hate hate the partial feeds.

[Susan]

I'm an blog/web illiterate so I really haven't got into the RSS feeds. I guess I should check them out huh? I could up the number of blogs I read if I did that right?

[Steph T.]

I have to agree that I hate a partial feed. I use a feed reader, because I can keep up on my favorite blogs better (and more efficiently). The only time I click to the site is when I have something to say...which some weeks is a lot and other weeks, not so much. I'll admit it...I'm just damn lazy and the extra clicks annoy me.

[Tamara]

Partial feeds make me itch in a delicate place. HATE.

[Jenny]

Totally get where you're coming from on the partial feed thing. Mine's set up full-feed.

As for reading, I don't mind one way or the other as I only use my reader to let me know when someone has updated and still go to the actual blogs to read the posts. Since I like looking at pretty blogs and tipping the blog writers in Adsense pennies.

[Procrastamom]

Count me in on the HATE PARTIAL FEEDS! group. They bug me so much that I have eventually unsubscribed from all of them, save for one writer who I love more than cheese and have read for years. I know that she always has something interesting to say, so I'll click through for her only.

[Jess in MA]

Dude, I hate partial feeds. Drives me batty and I usually find myself quitting after a while. I don't have time to read all the marvelous blogs out there as it is, and there are more I am missing. So if someone doesn't give me the whole shebang, I just move on.

Being a marketing/SEO dork I know that lots of people use the partials because they want people to see the ads and other stuff on their websites and blogs. They have my full sympathies, but really I visit these sites and blogs for real occasionally to comment or just check stuff out, so maybe they need to worry less. Also, with the end of the ad-free oasis in readers we're getting our PPC harassment now in that form, too. Oy.

[Mrs. CPA]

How exactly am I supposed to waste time at work with some kind of partial feed BS? I need the full thing! There aren't a whole lot of sites that I can actully access from the feeds because they are blocked. And I can always mark it as unread for when I get home to leave a comment. You partial feeders (or those of you with 500 social network clickes at the bottom in your feed), I unsubscribe and don't have a whole lot of time at night to go back and check out your blog. So it may be that you don't care that I don't read anymore, but I bet there are a lot of poeple feel the same way.

[KimAZ]

Unrelated to RSS feeds: I am a teacher who has been home every summer with 2 kids and not gone crazy! I know! It's actually possible. I have many suggestions for surviving the coming 3 weeks. Shall I e-mail you?

[Erin]

Partial feeds are crappy - a fair bit of my reading gets done at work, and many of my favorite blogs are blocked, whereas my feed reader is not. Sorry!

[sumo]

I don't do feeds, partial or otherwise. I prefer to suckle straight from the teat.

WHAT?

[divrchk]

I used to hate partial feeds but I switched to Firefox and to Google Reader and there is an addon called better greader and it pulls the entire post into the preview pane without opening another tab. Now, I don't really care too much. I'd prefer full feeds but partial ones aren't as bad any more.

[Lindy]

I can't be bothered to comment half the time so partial feeders are SOL. If they expect me to click through just to read a post that might be crap well sorry I'll just skip down to the next one.