As I approach 1400 subscribed feeds in Bloglines, I’ve been making some changes in the way I read my feeds.
First, I’m adding more feeds to my Short List category. That’s the one I’m paying the most attention to. I migrating the really good feeds in my other categories into the Short List, so I don’t miss out on them. The flipside of that is that I’m ending up spending more and more time between full feed reads, and unread items were piling up. I would usually go a few days between feed reads, but I started to feel a little overwhelmed when I saw my total unread items climb above 20000.
So, I’ve been going through, category by category, and pruning my feeds. I’m using two criteria. First, if a feed is just way too noisy (generates way more new items than other feeds in the category), I’m dumping it. Second, if a feed is only providing titles/headlines, or is truncating their feed after a certain number of characters (with the telltale …’s), it’s gone.
Partly to save me time, but more to send a message - if you’re not going to provide a full text RSS feed, you’ve lost my readership. There’s no good reason to provide a crippled feed. I understand that you want to make me visit the full site, so you get page impressions, and ad views, but crippled feeds don’t make me want to click on your site. In fact, it makes me feel just the opposite.
So, if you’re providing a less-than-full-text RSS feed, and you turn over a new leaf, and want me to subscribe, just drop me a line.
EDIT: Just finished my first pass through. That felt a lot like work. Went from just under 1400 feeds to 1250, hopefully much more manageable now.
TinyScreenfuls Feed (this blog)
hahahaha…you really think pruning by 10% is gonna help you Josh?? Come now. Get the axe and start chopping away. Your children want your time, I want your time, and your blog wants your time….there has got to be a few more space wasting feeds in there…try to get it down to 1000. That can be your magin number.
Hey, this was a good post! I rarely read feeds, so I probably haven’t paid enough attention to mine. Thanks for the reminder.
Cheers!
Yeah, but your own RSS feed doesn’t even provide a summary, much less a full feed. You should really dog food this first!
Eh? My feed (http://www.tinyscreenfuls.com/atom.xml) has always been full text. Are you seeing it differently? What aggregator are you using?
Full feeds rule because they are fully usable on the phone using a mobile agregator like bloggo.net or winksite.com. For some reason, however, your feed doesn’t work in winksite, this is what I see…
—Start—
TinyScreenfuls.com
2005-03-25 16:56:00-08:00
I’m Goin’ to Gnomedex 5.0!
Posted by Josh Bancroft
———–
This entry cannot be displayed on your device either 1) because the content is empty or 2) because the content contains code not within a CDATA section.
— End —
Works fine in Bloggo which is WAP2 only. Winksite is more popular and delivers WAP1 or WAP2 content depending on what your device accepts.
Im using NewsBreak for Windows Mobile on a PPCPE device. All I see is the title.
For those having trouble with my feed, can you check if your aggregator fully supports the Atom syndication format? My feeds are in Atom format, and I know that some aggregators have trouble with that.
As an alternative, you can try the following URL for a Feedburner “burned”/optimized version of my feed, which should work with all aggregators:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/TinyScreenfuls
Try it out, and let me know if you’re still not seeing full posts.
Using http://feeds.feedburner.com/TinyScreenfuls Didn’t help with Winksite.com. I got the same error. The feed validates fine so I’m going to open a ticket with Winksite as they clain Atom support.