But I offer both, because some people (I’m one) WANT partial feeds. I read a lot of feeds, and want to be able to skim the excerpt to see if I do want to read the whole thing.

Interestingly, I’ve been tracking the growth and full feeds are not necessarily as popular as people think they are. “Full feed” is the defualt at my site, which means extra work if you want partial, yet partial stats still grow: http://aplawrence.com/Web/fullorpartial.html

It’s a very interesting subject. I’m currently using partial feeds but I don’t have enough data to say if it’s working ok or not. I’ll keep checking and may change to full in a few weeks and test for another couple of months.

It’s not a very scientific test but at least I could get an idea.

The site I’m talking about it’s only two months online.

I’m using Drupal as my CMS and I can decide the teaser I want to use, I usually try to get a good headline, a compelling one, and the meat of the my article in the first paragraph. By using this teaser function I have control over what is shown and there are not sentences cut in the middle.

I am subscribed to many blogs and as a reader I also prefer full feeds but quite often I click in my feed reader (I use rojo.com) and go to the site.

As a publisher I want readers to come visit my site and I think that good posts that invite users to be a part of the discussion can get that, when users want to comment they have to visit the site.

Regards!

One question:
I don’t know how to create full text RSS feeds,
Any source or help is highly appreciated.

Regards,
Karim

What I dislike about partial feeds is how they cut off mid sentence. grrrr…

If a blogger wants to publish partial feeds (for the skim readers), then I recommend using the ‘Better Feed’ wordpress plugin where you can set the cut off point for the partial feed.

I think the main reason it causes problems using partial feeds, is the fact that most bloggers don’t think about it when they write. Most people warm up to a topic, and if they do that it is likely not to interest any readers, because the beginning is intro, fluff, or non-relevant to the title.

IF you are going to use partial, hit the meat of in those first few sentences even if it is just a snippet of what you will cover. As this is likely to increase your chances of feed readers / skimmers to actually click thru to your site.

That is also good advice for full feed bloggers too, as skimmers still read titles, and sometimes a few sentences (it just isn’t as important).

Solution: Full FEED

Myself, I publish full feeds, and prefer to subscribe to full feeds. My feed reader takes partial feeds and will actually load the website page in my reader rather than showing me the partial. If the website is down, I can always switch to text mode and see what the partial feed says.

The only problem with that was that feedreader broke that on some of my feeds I subscribe to when they had those email and comment images plopped into the bottom. Oh well.

Agreed. I wonder how we can test this theory out? Many significant bloggers (hi Darren!) have partial feeds on and I’m fairly certain it’s the money issue. Unfortunately it’s not easy to determine how many people are *not* reading an article because only a summary feed is made available.

I think many are taking a short-term view of possibly loosing out on immediate AdSense clicks whereas I see it as if you provide quality content over time I’m more prone to actually visit your blog.

Remember also that most people still visit blogs via their browsers and rss is still relatively in the early adopter stage – and I think such early adopters are fairly ad blind.

Now, most of your posts Yaro … bloody massive reads. Now that’s one instance where I’d gladly take a partial feed