Feeds and Ledes

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  • by Frank Paynter on January 27, 2024

    Readers who use RSS don’t get the whole picture.  This is true whether you send a full feed or a summary.  If you send summary info via RSS, you should master the art of the lede.  I intend to do that.  I want to hook the reader into clicking through to the blog.  This will be especially important once I start selling t-shirts and shit. 

    At Krugle, Chris Locke points out that if you read the RSS feed, you miss the sidebar info.  Today he asks feed readers to click through so they can see some cool technorati charts about Web 2.0 and shit.

    I’m adopting a Madame Levian conversational style today.  That means I say "and shit," and shit.  Also "Bah oui."  And shit.

    Steven Streight commenting on the Krugle post points out that graphics rich posts are better sent as RSS summary.  And the irony is that people don’t know what they’re missing if they don’t click through.

    Like me, Steve uses his blogroll (and I assume other people’s blogrolls) rather a feed reader.  Blogrolling dot com has an "updated" feature, so we can see when people have new content.  Unfortunately it generates a lot of false positives.

    Tom Shugart showed up italicized on my blogroll today.  New content?  He must have been testing his ping-o-matic or something.  Maybe he was doinking with his template.  Still the same content up there that he posted late last summer, and it’s nicely formatted!

    { 7 comments… read them below or add one }

    Elayne Riggs 01.27.06 at 6:56

    Oh, I hope you don’t decide to use partial feed. I’ll click on a blog if I have something to comment on (like now), but otherwise my blog-reading list is just too long to click away from Bloglines just to read something on someone’s site instead. So if you do go to partial feed I’m afraid I’ll wind up merely skimming your first few lines before I move on to the next blog.

    Brian 01.27.06 at 8:00

    If I didn’t use RSS I’d never read your blog, Frank. Too many interesting blogs to read, not enough time in the day.

    fp 01.27.06 at 8:07

    There is no RSS.

    RB 01.28.06 at 3:03

    …an’ no Sanity Clause, neither.

    Tamar 01.28.06 at 11:35

    I don’t know what is RSS. I read your blog every day, Frank - sometimes many times a day.

    Liz 01.29.06 at 5:29

    Thanks for the lede link, friend, I do need help in that department. I am up to 250+ blogs in bloglines, and I strongly prefer the full feeds…Like Elayne, I only click through if I want to comment, or if the post seems to have illustrations I need to see.

    I’m in the process of reconfiguring my blogroll, to differentiate the ones I read through bloglines from the ones that don’t have a feed.

    fp 01.29.06 at 10:17

    Liz… I’ve got a “subscribe link” just above the HighBeam advertisement. I think it works. I should swap in one of those orange graphics so people can see it better.

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