I’ve decided to go back to summary feeds only. I know some of you will be unhappy about this, but the naked truth of it is that people who read the full feeds don’t come to the site. When I can try Google’s new ad program for RSS feeds, I’ll try full feeds again. Unhappily they aren’t accepting any new advertisers at the moment.
In the meantime, thanks to fds for his excellent suggestion about the Summaries. Starting today I will be manually writing the summaries for each new article; so at least what you see in the feed will make some sense.
your posts aren’t full. they are mostly bullet points and “note to self” comments.
when’s the book coming out?
While I’ve enjoyed reading what you have to say, your constant “updating” of your feed, and subsequent need to “re-read” pages that have been reloaded into my aggregator, has annoyed me to no end. As of now I’ve removed your feed from nnw and will visit your site only when it comes to mind. Unfortunately that will probably no be often.
Sam – That’s what this site is all about…the actual writing of the book. I know other people who have taken years to write their books. Hopefully this one won’t take me that long. Mike
Mike – I understand your feelings, but constant revisions and rearranging is the nature of this beast. Mike
Mike, I really don’t mind the summary RSS feed because I’d really like to help support you and your work by visiting your blog. Maybe you’ve considered it and hate the idea, but I think it would be nice for you to get a “donate” button. I’m poor, so I’m far more likely to give $5 directly to you then to spend $300 dollars at amazon (and give you $3 of that).
there are in fact google adsense ads for feeds. your favourite search engine knows more about it.
I can understand your decision. It must cannibalise your Ad revenue doing full feeds. I think it would be great if you were able to do full feeds with ads though.
Here is a link to adsense for feeds
At the moment this is a beta program but you can sign up to it now. If the link does not work just go to Adsense help and search for “feeds”.
My problem is that with the summaries it’s hard to tell when an entry has been updated in an interesting manner (i.e., something written rather than just the bullet points). Is it possible that you could insert some sort of short text in the feed very briefly summarizing the update?
tdh1, there is a donate button, isn’t that what the paypal link in the “Donate” section does?
Also, no name, wasn’t there adsense in the feeds when a full article was published?
Avast! You be right Somebody! Me eye-patch was covering me good eye.
Pierce – the Google for Feeds program is not accepting any new sites at the moment. So I have to wait. And I tried the Yahoo stuff, but it’s junk.
Tim – I’m trying to come up with something like you suggest. Mike
tdh1 – I had a big ‘donate’ button in the sidebar for a couple weeks, but nobody clicked it so I took it off. The small one is still in the navigation bar. Mike
These summary feeds should be more accurately called DRM. A summary of what? It’s the first couple of lines of each post and a stupid ellipses. If it really were a summary, one actually written by a human being, telling as what is updated, it wouldn’t be quite this insulting.
A complete feed is imperative on a site such as this where previous items are constantly revised. That way, I could quickly glance at NetNewsWire’s output and see what has been changed thanks to the highlight differences feature. I’d have visited the site anyway so that I could read the comments.
When a site fails to offer proper feeds, I either write a script of my own to generate the feed I want, or just unsubscribe. Making my own feeds is of course costing me time and causes unnecessary traffic for both of us, so I’m more likely to go with unsubscribing in this case.