Unsubscribing from summary feeds
Full content is much appreciated in feeds. If you’re worried about your ads not being clicked from the site for lack of visitors to blog due to full content served, you could always use Google adsense for feeds or still better use Feedburner for your feeds that also has an option to serve ads. So, there are really no excuses not to run full content in feeds. If you still can’t, then I won’t bother either.
The other major suckage is that some blogs have awful load times, almost crawling to death. I believe they’re because they depend on external services like Blogrolling, Flickr or statlinks to fill in the sidebar content. One way to get around this would be to serve your content first and then those links, if you really can’t do live without the elements loading from external sites.
Perform a simple check by firing-up your blog in Firefox, go to View > Page Style > No Style and then check the content. Does the layout serve the blog content first or the sidebars first? If you’re getting the latter first, then your blog might do well with a change of layout that can serve blog posts or blog content first and then the rest of the elements.
How exactly do you change the order in which your blog loads up?
Sep 29, 05 at 20:06A webpage is just a page full of content with or without styling. The order of loading of content is purely based on html markup. The order does not respect styles while loading.
So choose a template that loads posts first: look-up the html markup and see if it is loading your posts first. If not choose the one that does. If you’re unable to see the code (some providers don’t allow you to see the code), you can load a template first and then check it by View > Page Style > No Style.
If the order of appearence from the top is loading your sidebar content first, then this *not* the template you want. Elements in the sidebar slow-down loading your actual content).
Oct 1, 05 at 01:38And if you can’t or not allowed to dig in to the code (some service providers like TypePad and WordPress.com don’t allow), you could always choose a different template that loads content first.
Oct 1, 05 at 01:40I guess Chetan your advice is not meant for bloggers using free hosting services like blogger.com or JRoller where tweaking the feed is not possible. I have also seen few aggregators strip the HTML of the post. I can’t be blamed here to ensure that the reader visits my blog to read the full post, the teaser in the feed should serve the purpose, arousing interest, that’s it. IMHO, the decision to publish full post in feed should be the prerogative of the blogger and those who do not do so may not necessarily be “evil”.
Oct 4, 05 at 05:59Blogger allows you a choice of serving feeds (Blogger: Settings > Site Feed > Description > Full), though I have no idea about JRoller.
Ofcourse. In the same breath, the option of choosing to read only a full post in feed is the prerogative of the reader, which is what this post (and specifically my choice to read) is about. Who said anything about “evil” =).
Oct 4, 05 at 12:39