projo.com | Subterranean Homepage News

« Senate kills more federal money for national ID; Would a chip make you feel safer? | Main | Facebook is the opposite of what I'm looking for »

July 31, 2007

Dear RSS readers, you'll only see excerpts now

If you read this blog in an RSS reader, you'll only see excerpts now, with a headline link to the post. The company wants you to visit the site.

I hope you'll find it worth your while to click those links, and I'm very sorry for the inconvenience.

Full or partial feeds, feeds with ads, clickthrough rates on partial feeds -- all have consumed lots of bandwidth across the blogosphere. Maybe some bloggers -- influencers -- reading dozens of feeds daily will no longer take the time to click through to the full post, and will no longer point here.

I hope not, but there's nothing I can do about that.

This is making me rethink how I blog. If I lead with a photo, the caption could be the entire excerpt. If I write a "soft" lead and the "nut 'graph" is down aways, I could mislead you.

On those days I toss out a pile of links, do I try to fit the jist into 40 words, an RSS haiku?

Much to think about.

Posted by Sheila Lennon at 2:13 AM | Permalink

Comments

Perhaps you can suggest to Belo that they fix the RSS feeds for all their blogs (especially the 7 to 7 one) so that the links to "View article" go to the permalink for that article and not the main page for the blog (which I think is only an issue with the 7 to 7 blog come to think of it).

I prefer seeing the full article, but if the RSS links go to the permalink, it wouldn't be as bad.

Posted by: Jim Rizzo on July 31, 2007 9:35 AM

Jim, thanks for the good feedback.

7 to 7 is a special case. The editors want the links on the headline displays on the homepage and on projo.com/blogs to take you to that post on the main page, rather than to the permalink, so you can easily scroll to the other items.

To do that, just for that blog I generated anchors for each post, but they only work for the one day the post is on the main page. There are also permalinks, and I'll look into sending those out in the RSS feed.

Thanks for pointing this out.

Posted by: Sheila Lennon on July 31, 2007 11:30 AM

The 7 to 7 RSS feed should now point to the permalinks, which makes more sense. You may read the RSS links days after the items have moved off the main index page, the only place anchors apply.

Posted by: Sheila on August 3, 2007 3:33 PM