Reading feeds on a PDA
Thu, 10 August, 2006 – 9:59 am
Bloggers take note!
I now read virtually all of the RSS feeds, that I subscribe to, on my PDA using an RSS reader. It's easy to use, I can sit on the couch or in bed reading them. Almost like an electronic newspaper, allowing me to catch up with the day's news. However putting out excerpts in the RSS feeds means I have to use a browser to visit the site (which never fits in a PDA screen!) to read the full feed. To be honest, unless the feed excerpt is exceptional then it's not going to get read, and even then it may be another day before I read it on my laptop. Because of this I'm having a serious rethink on the feeds I subscribe to. I already read a fair few sites and cannot understand why full feeds cannot be put out by these sites (in Wordpress go to Options->Reading and show Full text on the Syndication and not a summary). My only assumption is that people want you to physically visit their site to read the post - why? You have my feed hit in your stats, I'm not really an ad clicker. Is it to increase hits for a counter that requires a page impression? Because that's the only real reason I can see why people would only put out excerpts (that and not realising/knowing how not to). Virtually all blogs I subscribe to I check the feed on at least once a day, however to keep my, and presumably others, regular reading, please put out full posts or at least provide a substantial reason as to why the posts are in excerpt format! 
8 Responses to “Reading feeds on a PDA”
Good point.
Mine now sent as full text.
By Chris H on Aug 10, 2006
Oh, and do you know if the function in a post gets in the way?
By Chris H on Aug 10, 2006
The function?
By Sarah on Aug 10, 2006
Oops, wp took the code out. Twas the more function.
By Chris H on Aug 10, 2006
"I already read a fair few sites and cannot understand why full feeds cannot be put out by these sites".
The first time somebody starts republishing your feed on their spam blog, word for every last word, and every single post you make, you might get an understanding. I don't mind when people republish my snippets, but if I'm sending a full feed, the ENTIRE POST gets ripped off and syndicated elsewhere. Sure they can scrape a non rss site to steal, but it's much harder and much less popular. Rss theft takes little time and little thought with many software packages and tutorials to help.
I've had it happen many times (1-2 times per week at it's peak on my popular site) by spammers and it is quite a headache. I've got better things to do than chase these people down.
I've also allowed a site to republish my entire feed which had more authority than mine (this was with my permission, I thought the exposure would be good), and then google dropped my site like a hot tomale!!! Googlebot saw the content on two sites and thought I was the scraper, arhhh. I quit that real fast and went through the reinclusion request process. It took forever to get back in the index. (point: others republishing your full feed can kill your serps, watch it like a hawk)
I'll probably never publish a full feed again until the technology can prevent people from republishing the feed, or I'm willing to scan daily to make sure It's not getting republished.
It's an old debate full vs. snippet. Just my 2 cents.
By 45n5 on Aug 10, 2006
Chris - The function doesn't interfere with the RSS feed
Mark - Good point, something I didn't think about. I just ignore people duplicating my posts. Most blogs that have used one or more of my posts are usually shut down by blogger or just disappear off into the distance after a few days.
How about offering a full feed subscription service? Allow people to sign up to your site to get the full feed. Perhaps they tag their username on the end of the feed to get it in full. This way if anything got ripped off you could follow the username being used. Just a thought. I know I could write it in PHP and I think you're pretty proficient in PHP too
By Sarah on Aug 10, 2006
I'm a php hack, not proficient at all
Even with a user name tacked on a feed url, if the content shows up on a site, there is no way to relate that content to a feed user. For instance I sub to sarahfeed.php?user=45n5 locally and publish the content on a random site. There is no way for you to tell which feed it's originating from, maybe the content got there from sarahfeed.php?user=bobG. If I understand things correctly.
Even by IP doesn't work. When I experimented myself with feed ripping I grabbed the feeds on my local machine and uploaded to my DB. So the offending site IP never showed in the logs of the sites I ripped, just appeared like a normal user.
Pda's aren't the only users that small snippets hurt, people that travel or anybody that reads their feeds away from an internet connection can't read anything but the snippet. Bummer and I feel you.
I've seen the debate many times, never with an answer. However it's generally agreed the best way to NOT have your feed stolen is not offer it in a full text format. Personally I just had my feeds stolen one to many times.
By 45n5 on Aug 10, 2006
Mark, my apologies, feel free to use my PHP learning section
As for the feed control… hmm you've got me thinking now. I know what you mean, essentially they're going to grab the feed via a username but display it using their own site, not parsing your feed. However from what I can tell these spammers pull the feed from searching say the feedburner database which of course would just have the excerpt. I'd imagine that if a spammer is prepared to sign up to get a unique id (if you make them hard to guess like a 7 digit number they'll never forge another user's) just to get the full feeds then that spammer would be prepared to copy directly from the website. It's a shame there'd be no way of embedding in a code into the feed.
Anyhow, debate aside, your site is on my frequent feeds list so it's read on the laptop regardless
(after all that) - still a good discussion that's got me thinking!
By Sarah on Aug 11, 2006