Stop Truncating RSS Feeds!
I don’t surf the internet looking for new articles to read very often. I don’t have to do so. Most of the internet articles I read are subscribed to from the RSS feeds in my Google reader fed through Feedly, and I can read them all in one place (my phone) like a perpetually refilling magazine of goodness.
Today, I decided to expand that list of goodness and add to it some art news, photo tips, and other new sources. I found some extremely high rated and seemingly well written online sites and added them to Feedly, but upon opening the new content in my reader I found, to my dismay, that nearly all the new feeds were truncating their articles’ content. You, dear reader, may have a blog or other news source feeding into the pulsating masses through some variation of Really Simple Syndication. If you do, please consider this. A large quantity of readers are not surfing through the slow loading graphical content of your website on their various mobile devices, nor do they want to have to do so. If you want readership to expand keep your RSS feeds unlimited in length and allow Twitter sharing. I now am going back through my newly found RSS feeds and deleting them based on their truncation. I’m not certain the reasoning behind the dreaded “click to read full” or other variation of doom and despair, but there are easy ways of tracking even RSS readership, so stats boosting should not be a factor.
I may be just ranting to no justified end, but I’m pretty certain I’m not alone in this mindset. I’m now (mildly) advocating a boycott of all web news sources, blogs included, that truncate their RSS feeds and force me to actually load their page to read the textual content.
Bleck!
