I’ve noticed lately that blog feeds have been getting … truncated. It’s a setting in Blogger, and, apparently, people have been setting it. I’m wondering why they’ve been doing so, as it truly is absolutely maddening for those of us who use feed readers.
I used to be able to read through blog posts using my reader & get the full feed for blogs like Still Life With Books or Feeding My Enthusiasms or Baking Soda and read the entire post, clicking through when I felt the need to comment. Now I only get the first x number of characters, without any pictures, and may mistake the post for a comment, because it’s so short. I find this quite aggravating, and just wonder why this is happening?
If it’s a concern over licensing or copyrighting or something, there are settings for appending a footer to each post, which can be used to clearly indicate that the content is copyrighted or “creative commons licensed.” So … is it because you’re proud of your layout, and believe that we should read from your blog site directly? Because, really … it’s a toss-up. The sites I’ve mentioned I will actually click over and read … but I’ve unsubscribed from, oh, maybe 5 sites in the last couple of weeks, because they’ve changed to abbreviated feeds, and I just couldn’t be bothered.
So, folks: please tell me what’s going on out there that’s causing you to abuse those of us who use readers.
{Edit: And, if you’ve decided to truncate, you need to probably subscribe to your feed, because unless you’re a fabulous writer, the first 250 words may be a very poor lead-in to whatever you’re posting about.}
{Further Edit: check out the screen-shots of the Blogger Dashboard below, to see where to change these settings. The first picture is the “basic mode” for these settings, the second is “advanced mode,” whereby you have control of each feed separately.}
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Three cheers for typing up this blog post! I agree wholeheartedly! Most times I skim the first lines and move on to another feed, seldom going to the person’s blog. I emailed one women when she had only titles (even more frustrating), and she wasn’t even aware and quickly changed it.
And how do you contact someone if they don’t have a public email in their profile? Leave a comment on one of their posts? It’s just awkward, really.
I’m thinking that it’s possibly due to wanting to see the statistics or something – to have an accurate count of readers / visitors – but … well, you’re driving them away, as well.
Just came back from holiday and Hellooo David! I’m so sorry you’re aggravated….but I’m clearly “one of those women” dear Kansas A is talking about because I don’t even know what truncated is let alone that I’d do it on purpose. (of course I am a fabulous writer so 250 words must do the trick ;-))
So…better than talk let’s do something to solve it. But ahem what can I do? Any suggestions? There is an email adress on my site though…
Sorry, everybody, for bleating about the problem without posting the solution – I assumed that it was done on purpose! Shame on me.
If you look at this post again, I’ve edited it to include a couple of screenshots of the Blogger Dashboard. One’s the basic setting, the other’s the advanced, so you can play with either. Just be sure to save your settings if you’re changing them (it’s down out of view, and it won’t warn you).
If you get an answer to the “why” question, please share it; I’m puzzled too.
Problem solved and fixed. (Stupid thing is that I was more or less convinced that I already had the setting on full… ). Thanks fo editing and reading me!
Cheers!
I’m with culinary curious. If you ever get to the “why” please let us know.
Update to everybody: pretty much each and every person I’ve heard from has said that they were unaware that it was behaving in this manner, so I’m wondering if Blogger had a hiccup or something. I subscribe to my own feeds, just so that I can see how things look to the rest of the world, so I’d notice … but everybody else? Not so much.
I’ve finally heard back from somebody who has set this intentionally. They point out concerns regarding copyright of both their text and their pictures. In addition they state that visiting their blog is like participating in the party rather than looking in through the window.