One interesting debate that seems to crop up now and again is whether to provide full feeds or not. Shelley Powers offers partial feeds because she likes her site’s design and wants people to see it. I, on the other hand, would prefer people not to see mine, so I provide full feeds gladly. The main reason I provide full feeds is that I like it when other people do it. I would love to visit every Web site I read every day, but the convenience of RSS trumps the overall experience of visiting particular sites for me. And besides, I have NetNewsWire configured so that the page for an entry opens in a new tab in my browser every time I hit enter. For longer entries, I usually just do that and go read them on the site where they live.
In any case, I went for about a year without even looking at the log reports for this site. Traffic is just not something I obsess over (or even care about, judging from my behavior). So for me, it’s better just to inject my thoughts into the great stream of ideas and see what happens.
As it turns out, I did get a stats package up and running on the new server and started examining my stats a bit. I’ll post about the results later.
March 24, 2006 at 10:36 am
I can’t imagine reading RSS feeds. the look and feel of the place are part of what forms a landmark in my mind for the writer’s persona, voice, history. what’s a homepage for, if not to put you in one-click distance from all the people you want to read on a daily or near-daily basis?
(I understand the convenience entirely, but the aesthetics just matter to me…)