Do You Like Full or Partial Posts?

Posted on October 5, 2007 by Bruce Keener

Update:

  • Based on reader comments, I added the ability to choose between Full or Partial Feeds in early October 2007.
  • However, more than 40 days later, only three people chose the Partial Feeds option. Hence, to simplify matters for everyone, I went back to offering only full feeds: it seems to be what everyone wants.

End of Update. Original post follows:

The purpose of this post is to get your viewing preferences, both for this blog and for its feed. I think most of you read the blog only on the feed, but some read the feed and the blog. Some read only the blog.

Regardless, I would like to know your viewing preferences. There are two ways I can show articles:

  • I can show every article in its full length. This is what I am currently doing for both this blog and for the feeds. Sites that I enjoy that do this are TechCrunch and Matt Cutts.
  • I can show the introductory portion of an each article, and then have a “Click to Continue Reading” link for those who are interested in reading the whole article. Sites that I enjoy that do this are Lifehacker, Paul Stamatiou, and SEOmoz. Note that I could do this and still allow the feeds to show the full article, or I could do this and allow the feeds to show just the introduction, so you would click only if you wanted to read the entire article.

I personally am one of those who likes to see summaries or introductory paragraphs, rather than the full articles, so I can scan a page and see which articles really interest me. But, I recognize that I might be in the minority on this. I do not know, though, which is why I am asking.

Let me know your preferences, please, for both the feeds and the blog.

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  • capo

    for the feed, an intro paragraph is fine. for the blog I’d prefer the full enchilada.

  • http://stein.everybody.org/journal/ Jeremy Stein

    For the feed, the full thing. I prefer to read everything in one place without having to jump to individual sites.

    For the blog, intros are OK so I can quickly scan through for previous posts that interest me to read in more detail.

  • http://palmdiscovery.net May C

    I personally prefer the full article. I normally get a bit annoyed with feeds that only offer a few sentences of the article so in those cases, I just change it to only showing the titles as it’s not very useful for me.

    If I don’t like it, I can always change it to only showing the title and that normally doesn’t happen to many full feeds unless they are really totally technical or boring.

    I think if you can allow the subscriber to choose the various formats you can provide: full feed or partial, that can allow the reader to choose.

  • http://www.keenerliving.com/ Bruce

    Hum, sounds like I need to research how to give the option of full or partial feeds. I have a plugin that will force full feeds even from a partial post, but have not yet found a way to give an option. I like the idea of having an option for feeds, though. As to the posts, still would like to see more folks weigh in on that. Bear in mind that even if I go with showing partial posts on the blog, when you click a feed to enter the blog, it will always take you to the full version of the article.

    I’ll do some researching.

  • pritchett4

    I prefer full feed – don’t like to have to jump back and forth to read something – I can scroll through faster than jump back and forth.

    Thanks!

  • Thomas R. Hall

    I know I’m late to the party, but I personally like full feeds. I usually red articles offline via FeedDemon and then if I want to post a comment, I will click on the article and post a comment online.

    For the site, I like full articles. Thanks for allowing those of us that read via RSS the option to have full posts!

  • http://www.keenerliving.com/ Bruce

    Hi Thomas,

    You’re always welcome to the party, no matter what time it is. :)

    Thanks for the feedback. I am pleased to be able to provide the option of full or partial feeds. Right now only one person uses the partial feeds, which surprised me a bit, but I knew the majority would prefer full.

    I decided to go with having the blog show a lead-in to the full article, because I was advised by a search engine optimization (SEO) expert that having full articles on the blog and on the single viewing pages would be seen by the search engines as duplicate content. The advice is from a true expert, so i figured I best follow it. Interesting to me, though, that Matt Cutts of Google fame uses full posts on his blog, and TechCrunch, one of the most popular sites in the world, does also.