RSS Feeds Experiment Gone Wrong!
I have been experimenting with my RSS feeds, just to see what is the best way for me to be using them. I was hoping to drive more traffic to my website by just putting the first few lines in the feed and then having people come to the website for the rest of the story. Unfortunately, all this did was drive more unhappy e-mail to my site. Here is an example:
I have not been a long time reader, but I started reading your RSS feed after reading about the USB drive hack (great work and articles). I really miss having the whole story in the RSS feed so that I can read your articles on my PDA, as now it’s just little snippets. Will you be changing the RSS feed back to a full story?
Johan
Well, Johan (and everyone else who did not like the change), you will be happy to know that I have changed the RSS feed back to the way it was. Hopefully, this will let people read the articles but not drop traffic to the site.
In fact, you can show your appreciation for the change back to the full story feed by coming to the site and digging around for some of the older stories that you may have missed in the past.
If you found this post useful, why don't you buy me a cup of coffee to show your gratitude?
6 Responses to “RSS Feeds Experiment Gone Wrong!”
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nogg3r5 Says:
November 20th, 2006 at 1:17 pmAt last! I was about to drop you a line myself!
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Tim Fehlman Says:
November 20th, 2006 at 1:53 pmI am a very strong proponent of the “If you like the blog, tell someone. If you dislike the blog, tell me!” approach.
I hope this helps everyone!
Tim
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Johan Says:
November 21st, 2006 at 11:25 pmWow, thank you for changing it back. It’s so much better now. You can always put an ad at the bottom of the artical in the feed, like gizmodo.com. Although I really like it ad free, if it comes to it that would be much better than only having snippet’s of the story.
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Tim Fehlman Says:
November 22nd, 2006 at 5:09 amGlad to do it. If the readers aren’t happy than what is the point of blogging? Because soon enough, I would not have any readers!
Tim
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Dave Gray Says:
November 22nd, 2006 at 8:19 am“Hopefully, this will let people read the articles but not drop traffic to the site.”
This comment surprises me. I actually think of RSS readers as traffic. Sure they are not visiting your actual site. But they are reading your content, is that not what it is all about. In actual fact an RSS subscriber is a better one to have because they are readers who are definitely interested in your content and are more than likely reading it! Where a “hit” is just that a hit - you don’t even know if they read the page that they landed on. You just know that they were there.
The other thing I was going to say is that there is a fairly strong feeling out there that abstract feeds are bad. Period. I have un-subscribed to feeds because of partial feeds. I like my reader (FeedDemon) and I don’t come out too often and I don’t want to. I surf the web from there, it is after all what I am interested in (and there is about 500 odd feeds to keep me busy), I don’t have to search content it comes to me. So thanks for going back to full feeds.
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Tim Fehlman Says:
November 22nd, 2006 at 10:04 amDave,
Firstly, I have to admit that my comment was not very “Web 2.0″. I was definitely still thinking about things in an old way. If people are reading my content, who cares how they are getting it? I guess the only real drawback is that they are not on the site and stumbling on other interesting articles.I also noticed that traffic really dropped when I switched the feeds so the numbers support your statements.
Thanks for stepping out of your feed reader and entering your comments. They are really appreciated.
Tim
