Art of Blogging

Today’s entry is brought to us by Giulia M of PebbleDashed.com.

RSS feeds are a common feature of blog scripts like WordPress and are useful for keeping subscribers informed when new content is added. But the default setting for an RSS feed is to show the full text of every post. Do you want subscribers to your RSS feed reading your complete content without ever visiting your blog?

The short answer is no. In a perfect world, all content would be free and readers would show their appreciation by visiting your site and click your links anyhow. But an RSS feed is a tool that allows readers to avoid visiting the sites they read regularly. To prevent that, you may want to set your RSS feed to show summaries only, with a link to your post in its entirety.

In WordPress, changing to teasers is as simple as going into your Reading options and under Syndication Feeds, selecting Summary instead of Full Text. WordPress will cut the beginning of your post after 50 or so words, often mid-sentence, and that is what subscribers to your RSS feed will see. (If your post is already shorter than that, it will be shown in its entirety.) This will not affect the content on your blog at all, and if you don’t mind the lack of control over the RSS teasers, it’s a quick and easy change to make.

If an automatically-generated teaser does not show your post to best effect, however, or you simply prefer having more control over your content, you also have the option of putting a tag in the HTML of your post. This allows you to cut your RSS summary wherever you like - at the end of a sentence, at the end of a paragraph, at a dramatic cliffhanger - but it will also cut the post as it appears on the main page of your blog. So readers who visit your blog directly will have to click one more time to see your entire post, and readers who come from the RSS feed will have had to click twice. It will be up to you as webmaster to decide if your visitors are likely to do that, or if that is a click too far.

Both changes will work, and your RSS feed will become a path to your site instead of an alternative to visiting it. The decision is yours as to what you like, and what works for you.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 26th, 2007 at 11:29 pm and is filed under Blog Tips, Howto Blog, WordPress MU, WordPress. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.