Feed readers take RSS feeds and display them in a meaningful way, but if you provide only summaries of your posts you make your readers’ lives harder and reduce the likelihood of your content being read.
RSS is a technology that is most effective for blogs, giving us an easy way to read authors’ content. Before the advent of Web-based apps like Google Reader, providing summaries of blog posts via the description tag made sense: there were fewer feeds around (worth reading) in those days so you received alerts when new content was made available, much like we still do now with email.
But as the number of blogs increases, and with the advent of blogging platforms like WordPress, Blogger and all the rest of them, “really simple syndication” (which isn’t what RSS stands for*) is widely regarded as the way to read blog posts.
I very rarely visit blogs any more, unless a particular post uses script that Google Reader can’t render or that RSS doesn’t reproduce. However, there is another reason that forces me to jump out of my reading panel and disrupt my flow, and that is incomplete feeds.
As I mentioned before, you used to be able to get away with putting a summary of your content in the description tag of each post’s item tag. (Most developers use the word “node” as it’s an XML term, but it’s a similar makeup to HTML so I’m simplifying). However, bloggers - or more specifically blogging platform developers - can embed the entire content of a post into the item tag by creating a content:encoded tag and importing a namespace (basically adding a line near the top of the RSS document). Feed readers understand this tag, which allows for storing of HTML, which obviously includes images and embedded Flash movies.
This relatively small change has a massive effect on the way a reader consumes an author’s content and it is very simple to implement, however there are still a number of blogs that don’t use this and I find it infuriating.
When I’m skimming through the new articles that have been written in the last 24 hours or so, if I see a headline that catches my eye - or a new article by a writer whose posts I particularly enjoy - I want to read the whole article there and then, in a familiar setting. I don’t want to have to click, scroll, adjust to the layout and continue reading.
Imagine if you were reading a newspaper, but instead of printing the full article the publishers just printed the page number of an accompanying magazine which was full of adverts. If they did that for every section you’d be up to your knees in cheap gloss.
Bloggers: please take a look at the source code for your RSS feeds. (You can do it in your Web browser.) If you don’t see a content:encoded tag for each of your posts, download the right plugin for your blog software or contact your developer because your posts could be going unread. (Failing that you could simply be annoying your readers, and there’s never a reason for that.)
There are people who, infuriatingly enough serve incomplete RSS feeds on purpose, because they want to track the number of subscribers they have. This is fairly pointless however because, if you are writing good content you will insight people either to comment on it, link to it, forward it on or visit the site to find out more, all of which are trackable. RSS readers are lurkers, so you should focus on converting them to real visitors by providing full content rather than arrogantly assuming they will follow your predetermined conversion path.
* it’s RDF Site Summary incidentally
