Big Picture: Full RSS Feed

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.

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  1. Darin commented on Feb 4

    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!

  2. Heather commented on Feb 4

    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.

  3. Scott Teresi commented on Feb 4

    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.

  4. Eclectic commented on Feb 4

    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.

  5. Andrew Finkenstadt commented on Feb 4

    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

  6. Chris Masse commented on Feb 4

    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.

  7. Jason G. commented on Feb 4

    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!

  8. C. Maoxian commented on Feb 4

    Full-text feed, hurray! (And it’s about time.)

  9. Tim Bourquin commented on Feb 4

    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.

  10. Brian commented on Feb 7

    Thank you very much for the full RSS feed. I still hit the site when I want to read comments. :)

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