Sorry…Dropping Partial Feeds from My RSS Reader
Right now, I have about 98 personal finance blogs in my reader. With limited time lately, I haven’t been giving enough attention to very many, if any, articles in my reader. It’s just been too overwhelming and I need to find a way to reduce the overwhelming sense of “too much going on”.
A week or two ago, I dropped about 20 PF blogs off the list due to lack of postings or uninteresting content (or both). This time around, I’m going to take a different approach.
I’m dropping any feed that is a partial feed.
Why don’t I like partial feeds? Would you, my readers, care to read Clever Dude from your favorite reader (like Google Reader) if I switch to partial feeds? I would expect a drop of at least half my readers in the first month, if not more. So the question begs “Why do bloggers run partial feeds anyway?”
The most common answer I see in the forums is because they (we) are afraid of:
- People ripping/scraping our feeds - I was worried about this too, and I have seen some sites, however rare, stealing full articles. However, it’s been a long time since then and lately, all I get are very tiny snippets of my articles showing up in weird “Hyundai Insurance” site feeds. I say screw the scrapers and go full-feed. You’ll get many more subscribers, unless you’re popular already.
- People not clicking through and visiting your site - You’ll get more annoyed readers who just skim past the headline or first few sentences, or readers that just unsubscribe as soon as they see the partial feed, than you’ll get readers that actually click through to reader your post and/or comment. I get plenty of site traffic and plenty of comments with a full feed.
There’s really no sane reason why you shouldn’t go to a full feed, but until then I’m going to have to say sorry to the following PF sites whose feed I’ll be dropping due to partial feeds. My hopes for linking back to them are that they’ll notice this post and consider switching to a full feed (and then let me know they switched):
- Boston Gal’s Open Wallet - Actually, B-Gal’s posts are well-suited for enticing people to click due to their setup. I do click through to the site pretty often, but no longer! I demand a full feed because I want to be lazy!!
- Everybody Loves Your Money
- Frugal Journey
Money Under 30UPDATE: CHANGED TO A FULL FEED!MoneyMonkUPDATE: CHANGED TO A FULL FEED!One Frugal GirlUPDATE: CHANGED TO A FULL FEED!- Saving Advice - The site already has almost 3000 subscribers, but I bet they could get way more by switching to a full feed. What are you afraid of?!?
This Writer’s Wallet(aka Gradgirl) UPDATE: CHANGED TO A FULL FEED!
So that was just 8 sites? Dang, Now I don’t have any other schemes to lower the number of articles I see in a day. Perhaps I should just ask Trent to post less often. Actually, I did find a few other feeds that haven’t posted in a month or more, or weren’t working properly. I’m down to about 86 PF blogs in my list, which is still pretty unwieldy. I’ll see how it goes though. However, I hope to be adding some sites back after they switch to full feeds!
P.S. I’m really glad Single Ma switched to full feed before I made this list. I’d miss her ability to enunciate words into a written form that is easy to understand, when I normally couldn’t understand them when spoken! 
Try one of these related posts too!:
- Updated My Reader List Page - Jan 4, 2008
- Subscribe to Email Updates for Clever Dude
- We’ve moved our RSS feed to Feedburner
- Google Reader Not Reporting Numbers - Feb 21, 2007
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I also hate partial feeds. I keep them in my reader, but unless there’s like half a post in the feed I rarely click through, in which case, I can’t in all good conscience recommend it on my blogroll.
I only subscribe to full feed. No wonder the list you provided above is not in my Google reader.
I don’t subscribe to partial feeds either. I read a lot of blogs, and don’t have time click through. If I can’t read it all in Google Reader I don’t subscribe.
I also don’t subscribe to blogs that post less than 3 times per week, blogs that do “pay per post” postings or blogs that use profanity.
Just a few ways I’ve trimmed my reader list.
I too hate partial feeds - and I think some bloggers just don’t realize they’re sending out partials (I asked MetaMommy of They Call Me Mommy to consider full feeds and she immediately changed her settings for me).
CFO, that brings up a good point. If you are a blogger, ALWAYS subscribe to your own feed. I accidentally switched mine to partial by installing the Post Teaser plugin that myself and CleverDude are using. Realized it since I check my own feed.
Well, I don’t want to lose you (or anyone else who feels this way), so I’m changing mine to a full feed.
I honestly have never heard this argument before, but yeah, it makes sense.
Thanks.
GG: I added you back on, but you’ll need to post something new before I see the update to full feeds. Thanks!
Full feeds will bring people in to comment as well.
So, Clever Dude, how do you read in Google reader? I set my reader to display only new content, all feeds and use the J or K keys to navigate through the feeds rapidly. If the topic of the feed item doesn’t appeal to me I make a quick decision and move on. Unless of course its a blog that I enjoy reading even if the headlines are sometimes mysterious.
The only reason I use a partial feed is I have some PHP code that I always have in the footer of the post. Unfortunately I haven’t an easy way to get Blogger to leave it out of the full feed. I know how to fix it with programming but I always have something higher priority on my list. Maybe I need to move the full feed priority up.
Randy, I do the same as you. Only show updated sites and unread articles and use the J/K keys. I’m a big proponent of using the keyboard over the mouse, if possible.
Good point, CFO. I just resubscribed to my blog a few times today to test the switch-over. I’d dropped the subscription when accidentally erased my reader, but now I’m going to keep it.
I’ll read partial feed posts, but I prefer to make an educated estimate of whether or not the post is good. Then if it’s good I may click through to comment anyway. Whereas, if your first 175 words aren’t engaging, I’ll move on. So to those with partial feeds—make your first few sentences stellar!
It’s funny that you posted this today. I was just adding your blog to my RSS feeder.
I didn’t set my blob post to be a partial feed on purpose, at the time I created my blog it was blogspot’s default setting. Since I don’t subscribe to my own feed I didn’t realize it was still in ‘partial mode.’ I have updated to the full feed. Thanks for bringing it to my attention.
My blog constantly gets scraped, which is really annoying me. BUT, I too hate partial feeds, so what can I do? I added a brief copyright statement at the end of each post, asking them to sign up for my real feed instead of my stolen one.
Also… you do realize that you do not ABSOLUTELY have to read every single blog in your reader, every single day… I have several dozen feeds in my reader, but I typically only get to 10 or so each day. When I do, I read only the posts that are of interest to me.
Clever Dude - What do you use for a feed reader? I still haven’t found one that I’m happy with.
Frugal Girl: You’re back on my reader. Thanks!
Matt: I use Google Reader. I haven’t tried any others, so maybe some others would have better organizational capabilities.
Shadox: I agree. However, I like to both have a clean reader when I go to bed and I like to keep up on what’s going on in the blogging community.
One thing I didn’t mention is that I’m getting overwhelmed with Consumerist and Lifehacker postings. They’re not PF blogs, so I never listed them, but honestly, they’re posting like 50+ articles per day combined.
Overall, though, I find myself skipping through about 95% of the posts in my reader because they’re not highly pressing to read. However, I love reading everyone’s articles, so it’s a lose-lose. Get through to the “important” posts, but miss all the other posts that are ripe with good info, but perhaps have a few poor leading sentences or headline.
I couldn’t agree more with the partial feed thing. I can’t stand the partial feeds. I like reading everything directly from my reader and tend to skip over all of the partials. I’ve recently dropped all the partial feeds as well. I don’t read many blogs on weekends and when Monday comes around it’s extremely overwhelming to have to go through 300 posts that you missed over the weekend.
Ask me to slow down? Slowing down would be boring!
Hey, I just wanted to let you know that you inspired me to unsubscribe to a bunch of partial feeds as well!
And yes, golbguru and Mrs. Micah, I agree that it’s super important to subscribe to your own feed!
Clever Dude — Can you update this post noting that I now allow full feeds? I can’t say if this post and my feeds are related, but I’ve lost quite a few subscribers since you posted this.
Frugal Girl, I’m updating it right now. Sorry!
I switched it to Full
I agree - the reason I use a feed reader in the first place is so I don’t have to visit individual sites. Partial feeds mess that all up.
I used to be (about 2 years ago) all gung-ho on partial feeds, most because of content scraping. but the truth is, those folks can scrape you pages regardless of what you put out in your feed. In the meantime, when they republish it’ll usually link back to your site anyway, so you get a backlink. More backlinks = better SE ranking. So, I figure, hey, great, let ‘em scrape. Dupe content doesn’t come into play since your site is clearly the originator of the content.
-Michelle
For those sites that don’t offer full feeds, you can easily get them by using this:
http://labs.echoditto.com/fulltextrss
Just put in the feed URL and then copy&paste the one they generate. In most cases that’ll give you the full feed.
Interesting. I’m glad to see that I chose full feed. I didn’t put much thought into it, but what you say makes perfect sense.
I’ve actually been subscribing to blogs with Google Homepage, but I’m starting to think that may be terribly inefficient. I have Google reader so I’m going to start adding everyone there and give it a go.
Partial feeds are a big pet peeve of mine. I endorse the change!
I trimmed my google reader of about 20 feeds last time after I slowly noticed a lot of websites turning to partials. Still got like 125 or so to keep me busy!
I have always hated partial feeds and I rarely click through to read the entire article. I think I’m going to eliminate some from my reader as well. I don’t know why I even keep them there!
Well, I’m a little slow…but I finally changed to full feed…thanks to your boot in the rear!
My feed was partial only because I didn’t know how to get around a Wordpress bug to make it full (partial feeds annoy me too!) But I finally got around to fixing it…thanks!