Imagine trying to hold a conversation with someone who never completed their sentences. Irritating, eh ?
I used to smile when people like Robert Scoble (and other well respected bloggers) used to get all heated and uptight in a raging controversy about a subject as innocuous as the thorny issue of partial versus full RSS feeds.
I used to think ‘Crikey. Aren’t there more serious things in life to worry about ?’ (football and music to name just two).
But now I agree that partial feeds are indeed the work of the devil. Partial feeds seem to defeat the whole point of RSS and I am growing to hate that tantalising ‘…’
I have configured Netvibes which looks excellent and is rapidly becoming my one stop home page, RSS reader, search engine, portal, email, calendar, calculator, everything.
Everything that is apart from being able to read blogs by people who insist on using partial RSS feeds.
People who insist on publishing partial feeds (step forward all you Oracle bloggers) are now forcing me to click another button in order to read their articles in all their glory.
Another click isn’t the end of the world but please remember that I am very lazy. It is also a context switch into another application (browser) when Netvibes is perfectly able of displaying the content.
I can understand commercial sites using partial feeds as they rely on advertising revenue so they have an interest in pulling people to the actual site. However for personal bloggers just writing for fun, I don’t see the point.
Well, actually, of course, I do see the point. Some personal bloggers are not just doing it purely for fun. They are doing it to see if what they are writing is actually of interest to anybody and whether anyone is watching.
That’s why they publish partial feeds, forcing the interested reader along to the site and incrementing the precious stat counter by one.
When I recently plugged this blog into a statistics counter, I toyed with killing my Feedburner feed (WordPress has a perfectly good feed) and converting to a partial RSS feed. Both of these changes would force people to my site, increase my traffic and boost my ego.
However, I decided against because some people may prefer Feedburner (for whatever reason) and other readers may prefer to read my words from within their favoured RSS reader without that extra click.
So I decided not to risk antagonising my audience (of two) and to leave well alone.