This message goes out to our 3000+ feed readers. Like any blogger, we hate partial feeds too. But we had to switch to partial feeds on DesiPundit yesterday. Let us explain why and then I hope you understand. DesiPundit has always believing in sending readers away…to the blogs we link to. In our previous model, we provided short excerpts and provided the link to the source which you dutifully clicked through from our feed. In our new model, we asked community bloggers to create a category called ‘DesiPundit’ (although some have been creative) from which we extract the category feed. We use this category feed to syndicate their posts and display excerpts on our site with a link that says, Continue Reading. Clicking on that link takes you to the original source.
However, the posts from our Community bloggers are displayed in full in our feed. That means, you no longer have to click through to the original blog we linked and can read everything off the DesiPundit feed. We don’t think this is fair to the blogger. After all, why would anyone agree to be a member of our Community if our readers are not visiting their blogs or not subscribing to their feed? Any attraction or incentive to be on DesiPundit is lost. Hence the partial feeds on DesiPundit.
Of course, if all community bloggers create a partial feed for the DesiPundit category using FeedBurner, we can get around this problem but then you assume everyone uses FeedBurner or knows how to or even wants to. Even if one community blogger does not have partial feeds, we’re back to square one. Some bloggers just want to write and care less about the technical details (unlike some of us). We rather figure something out at our end without asking our Community bloggers to do anything more than creating a DesiPundit category, writing posts, and tagging them for sharing on DesiPundit.
That said, we are not resigning ourselves to partial feeds forever but are actively looking for solutions. The ideal solution would be for partial feeds for the Community feed while retaining full feeds for other categories within the Entire Site Feed. Until then, we apologize for the inconvenience due to partial feeds and we hope that based on the title and excerpts provided, you click through to read. If there are any solutions you are aware of, we are all ears. Leave your thoughts in the comments.
Update: We finally managed to figure out a solution. Posts from the Community section are now partial and rest of them are offered in full. Thanks for all your suggestions and inputs.
Comments
15 comments. Leave your comment »
astra
Jan 6th, 2009 at 11:57 pm | #
make more then 1 rss feed?
Patrix
Jan 7th, 2009 at 8:45 am | #
We can but the default feed must provide excerpts only to prevent full display of content from Community bloggers
curdriceaurora
Jan 7th, 2009 at 9:42 am | #
i’d suggest a look at cricinfo blogs, all the separate sections and their respective feeds. Yahoo pipes may be.
curdriceaurora
Jan 7th, 2009 at 10:47 am | #
New and upcoming section can have it the old way and community posts with read more link?
Patrix
Jan 7th, 2009 at 10:51 am | #
curdriceaurora, And how about the combined feed which has both sections? Majority of our feed readers are subscribed to the full site feed. Getting them to choose and switch will be hell.
Manu
Jan 7th, 2009 at 11:25 am | #
Why can’t the combined site feed have full posts from new and upcoming and excerpts from community bloggers?
Also it is VERY irritating to have to click twice to read a feed. First click takes you to desipundit and then you have to click once more to read the original entry in full. So it is very important that people can click on to the original site from the feed itself. Look at daringfireball feeds. It is set up that way.
Patrix
Jan 7th, 2009 at 11:34 am | #
Manu, ideally we would like that too. But the way it is set up, ‘New & Upcoming’ and ‘Community’ are categories on the site. The solution we are looking for is, partial feeds for posts under the Community category (and its sub-categories) and full feeds for posts under other categories.
And I understand how frustrating an extra click can be. I can’t access the Daring Fireball feeds because they are membership-only.
Manu
Jan 8th, 2009 at 12:15 am | #
The extra click is extra annoying to your most loyal users as
No of extra clicks = No of articles read
Manu
Jan 8th, 2009 at 12:16 am | #
Btw daringfireball feeds are free
http://daringfireball.net/feeds/
Patrix
Jan 8th, 2009 at 7:38 am | #
Manu, like I said we understand but unless we find a solution or you provide us with one , we’ve to stick with it. We are not a VC-funded startup so we can’t just hire a PHP programmer to whip up a solution. We are actively looking for a fix.
At best, we can exclude Community posts from the main feed and have a separate partial feed that readers can subscribe to. But try asking 3000+ feed readers to add one more feed to their list. Also, the main feed with New & Upcoming posts will be updated far less frequently than the Community feed.
Manu
Jan 8th, 2009 at 12:25 pm | #
I’m a professional web developer and I’m willing to help. You can mail me if you are interested.
Balaji Dutt
Jan 8th, 2009 at 8:27 pm | #
Patrix – Apologies for asking about full text feeds over in the other article. I didn’t realize there was a separate post about this topic till now.
With respect to the points that you have raised above, I don’t have a complete solution for you. But I do have a bunch of different pointers that I think you might find useful.
1. In order to avoid the double click issue with community posts right now, I would suggest you syndicate the content using the FeedWordpress plugin – http://projects.radgeek.com/feedwordpress. It has the ability to make post permalinks directly point to the source, which eliminates the intermediate desipundit link.
Caveats – I know of a way to display the desipundit internal permalink on the desipundit homepage, but I don’t know of a way to introduce that in the feed content using the above plugin.
2. With respect to the need to “cut” community posts even if the incoming feed is full text, a little bit of coding might be required. Wordpress allows you to build a custom RSS feed using various template tags, including an option to automatically truncate the post after 50 characters. See here – http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags/the_content_rss and http://codex.wordpress.org/Customizing_Feeds
3. Assuming you do the above, you might then have to build a Yahoo Pipe that combines the custom community feed and your primary full text Desipundit feed. Use the Pipe RSS as input to your Feedburner URL and I think we are almost there
Thank you for taking the time to answer our (admittedly nitpicky) complaints about this
Balaji Dutt
Jan 8th, 2009 at 8:31 pm | #
PS: As manu has pointed out above, the Daring Fireball feeds are now full-text thanks to DF’s lovely sponsors. Go get it
Patrix
Jan 8th, 2009 at 9:52 pm | #
Balaji, We (rather Shripriya) finally figured out a way to do it. It was a bit roundabout, and involves gaadha-majuri with FeedBurner but it works just like we wanted it. Community feeds are partial and New & Upcoming and Featured are full. We are using the FeedWordPress plugin to aggregate the Community feeds but I’m afraid I’m not that tech saavy as to muck around apart from what our designer has done.
And now that you mention Daring Ball again, remember they have lovely sponsors without which full-text wasn’t an option
And we aren’t even asking for that.
Balaji Dutt
Jan 8th, 2009 at 10:09 pm | #
Patrix – Lo! And the Internets was filled the sound of much rejoicing, for the full text feeds had won again
Final note – do look at the FeedWordpress option to point permalinks to the originating website as well.