From the Perspective of a Feed Reader
25. May, 2007 
14 Comments - Leave your comment
Almost every morning when I get up and eat breakfast, I check my feeds in Google Reader. On a good morning, I have about thirty or so feeds waiting to be read. If I’ve neglected my feeds, however, sometimes I will have hundreds. Within this post, I will go over some observations I have made while reading feeds.
Use of the MORE Tag
A lot of blogs, including this one, make use of the <!--more--> tag for WordPress. However, this causes the feed to split once it reaches the more tag.
What are the chances of me clicking the “more” link to the blog post? Zero. I’ve already written about what I think of partial feeds, so I will not go into it here. However, part of the feed experience is allowing the feed readers to read the full post.
For those that use the MORE tag for WordPress, I urge (beg, actually) you to use the Full Feed plugin to allow full posts to be displayed.
Apologizing for Not Posting
When there are a hundred or so posts to be read, a post that reads “Sorry for not posting” sticks out like a sore thumb. My immediate reaction is to unsubscribe from the blog. I infamously wrote about “being too busy to blog” in my essay on WLTC, and I still stand by my point that it is a slap in the face of a reader.
All a “sorry I can’t post” post does is bring attention to your blog (in a negative way) and makes me reach for that unsubscribe button. The last thing I want to see in a feed reader is “sorry, I can’t post.”
Headlines
When there are a hundred or so feeds fighting for my attention, it is usually the headline that draws me in. Am I interested in the topic? Do I know what the topic is about?
It is important to realize that with feeds, your headline is going to be taken out of context of your blog. A headline that just reads “Weekend Survey” just won’t cut it. What is the survey about?
Bullets and Headings
Bullets and headings are extremely important for feed readers. Headings break the post into manageable and readable sections, while bullets allow the readers to skim the content.
Long posts such as the one shown in the image are rarely read by me. I prefer headings and bullets. I have a feeling I am not alone.
Mis-Aligned Images
Feeds are stripped of style. This means that images that are aligned left or right on a blog are typically not aligned left or right on a feed.
In the above image, the start of the post begins, “At the beginning.” However, the image forces the text over to the right. To get around this, I place the image in a paragraph and align it using CSS.
The code I use is: <p><img src="pathtoyourimage" style="float: right" alt="" /></p>
If you have WordPress, you can download a plugin I wrote called Feed Styler. It allows you to style your images so they show up correctly in feeds.
Conclusion
Thank you for reading about feeds from my perspective. If you have anything else to add, please do so in the comments.
Other RA Project Articles
Author Info
I use a Yahoo! Widget (RSS News Reader by John Hinds if you’re curious) to read my feeds and when I hover over an article, it aways says “No description. Click for link to article.” I’m not sure if that’s the fault of the reader or that the blog hasn’t defined a summary or something. The only time I do get a scrolling text of description is when I have a comments RSS in there. Know anything about this?
Good points. It never crossed my mind to check how my pictures look in the blog’s feed. I’m going to be more careful after reading your article. As of the “sorry for not posting” posts, those are really hilarious. I sometimes think to leave some evil comments, such as “who cares?”.
I have just subscribed to my own feed and I did not see at all what I expected: there were only excerpts, not full posts as I thought I had. I don’t use the -more- tag, I deactivated the evermore plugin, I installed what you recommended and I still get only excerpts. I spent almost an hour on this with no results so far. I’m sad.
You don’t use the more tag, yet your feed still says “more”? That’s rather odd. Make sure your WordPress settings say to show a full feed. That should be in Options->Reading.
The MORE tag is useful for showing excerpts on a blog’s home page, but not so useful in feeds.
Speaking of which, it does take some time to propagate updates to your feed reader. Make sure after you change some settings that you edit and save a post. This causes WordPress to re-cache the feed. If you just deactivate a plugin, the changes won’t be shown until after you publish your next post.
LaurenMarie,
I’m afraid I am unfamiliar with Yahoo as far as feeds go.
Thanks Ronald. You were right, it needed some time to propagate. When I checked it again this morning, it displayed the full feed, as I intended in the first place.
My friend, if there was an award for the best post written in 10 years. It would go to you, for this post. I am sure you’re controlling what you have to say… let it out, it’s all true! I agree 200%!
Sweeeeet. Best post written in 10 years eh? I wonder if there’s a blog award for that.