In response to numerous requests, I have opened up the Big Picture to a full feed, as opposed to a shorter excerpt. (If this lowers traffic, I may go back to the excerpts).
Several of you have suggested (pleaded) for a full feed, and quite a few of you advised putting advertising in the RSS feed. That’s something I will consider sometime in the future. If I can find am advertiser I like, that’s relevant (i.e., Amazon.com
) I’d be more comfortable.
If anyone has any thoughts as to this, please let me know in comments.
I don’t care what kind of ads you put on the feed; your stuff is good enough anyway, so I would read it no matter the kinds of ads appeared. You spend a lot of time on this and no one would blame you for some honest compensation. Hope you make a fortune!
Ugh. I hate full feeds. Especially ones with ads. IMHO, the whole point of RSS is that it doesn’t provide full content. I really like being able to see a whole bunch of posts at a glance. If I wanted full content, that’s what the web page is for! Phooey.
Heather,
Some RSS newsreaders (e.g. Safari) will let you choose how much text you want to see from each article. I prefer full text. With this change, the decision is at least put into the hands of each individual user.
I don’t know technically what you’re talking about, but I’d wade through adv to get to the valuable information you post.
…and certainly buy something if it appealed to me.
Maybe?:
-gourmet foods, coffee, spirits, etc.
-electronics, computers and peripherals.
-vacation, tours, cruises.
I’m one of the google-reader RSS readers. . . so thank you for making your site that much more accessible. I’ll still read nearly article for its comments at the end
Full feed is the way to go. Your traffic to your site will INCREASE —guaranteed.
As for ads at the end of each feed items, I know of tubetorial.com/feedvertising/ but it works only for Word Press as for now.
For TypePad, I see bloggers using a plugin that puts ads at the bottom of each feed item. See Guy Kawasaki: blog.guykawasaki.com.
I believe you can set up password protected RSS feeds (it depends)… you could offer a subscription based access to the full RSS feeds if you really wanted…
Not that you’d want to make that your blog model, but you could charge something low ($1/month? — see PayPal’s subscription service for a low cost way to do that) for those who absolutely HAVE to have the full posts in an RSS reader…
Good luck!
Full-text feed, hurray! (And it’s about time.)
Excellent news – feel free to put ads in the feed – I’d much rather have a full feed with as many ads as a regular web page than have to go to the page itself.
Thank you very much for the full RSS feed. I still hit the site when I want to read comments. :)