Blog Notes: Should I Change My RSS Feed?
I’ve been reading some of the debate about Shyftr with some concern.
I just don’t like the idea of someone grabbing my stuff and distributing in ways that help them reap profit.
Right now, my RSS feed is set to send out the entire content of posts.
I’m wondering if I should set it to send out only a few lines of summary.
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April 14, 2008 at 3:22 pm
If it switches to excerpts instead of full text, I’ll stop reading.
April 14, 2008 at 3:33 pm
Jason: I’m curious. Do you read it in an RSS reader or are you using one of these services that allow people to swap/share and comment about feeds? WordPress lacks tools to report even the number of people who are choosing RSS to read this, so I have no idea at all how many people are doing that.
April 14, 2008 at 3:38 pm
Ugh. Summary feeds are terrible. When they do show up in my newsreader, most of the time I just skip past them and on to another article.
Sounds like Shyftr is changing their policies anyway. My vote is to leave it as is.
April 14, 2008 at 3:43 pm
Another suggestion. Not sure if the hosted version of WordPress lets you do this or not, but you can publish your RSS feeds via Feedburner instead of the built-in RSS feature of WordPress. Feedburner gives you a lot more control over RSS and also offers usage statistics.
Here’s some background: http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_FeedBurner
Again, not sure if it’ll work with the hosted WordPress. Might want to ask them.
April 14, 2008 at 3:50 pm
I’m “subscribed” through Google Reader.
You might be interested in reading about the stats available from Google Reader and Feedburner here:
http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2007/10/find-number-of-google-subscribers-for.html
WordPress’s hosting may not allow for it, but you might want to check out http://www.chrisfinke.com/wordpress/plugins/feed-statistics/ anyway (from a comment at the above article).
Anyhow, I do hope you keep the full text in your feed. I just find the ‘tease’-type feeds frustrating so I tend to not keep them in my feed reader.
April 14, 2008 at 4:06 pm
When I was using that Finnish Device of the AntiChrist Incarnate (ramin knows which), I was — before it died (the software, that is) — using the RSS feature. I hated the summary feeds too.
OK, the public has spoken. I’ll leave the feed as it is. Thanks for commenting!
April 14, 2008 at 9:01 pm
Re: Finnish Device of the AntiChrist Incarnate
Maybe we can get the Pope to stop by and take them off our hands… :-)
April 15, 2008 at 7:09 am
HAHAHAHAHA. Thanks for starting my day off with a laugh, ramin!