I love that people at eMusic are posting at 17 dots; as I mentioned previously, it’s integrating eMusic itself into the eMusic user community. But. . . I do almost all my blog reading using a feed reader (NetNewsWire in my case), and it’s driving me up a wall that 17 dots doesn’t have a full text feed. Given the rate that they’re posting at, there are a lots of posts to read, and it really interrupts my flow when I see something I find interesting only to be stopped by the inevitable “(more…).”
This practice is not unique to 17 dots, of course. Bob Lefsetz does this too, and the excerpts in his feed are often even more abbreviated. I can sort of see why Lefsetz is doing this; presumably among other things he wants people to come to his web site and subscribe to his email newsletter. But what’s the reasoning behind 17 dots not offering a full feed? There’s no “pitch” on the web site itself; the post pages don’t have ads for eMusic or even a link to eMusic. So why deny us our God-given right never to leave our feed reader?
P.S. I noticed that James Governor (of Redmonk fame) also complained about this.
Tim - 2007-04-21 12:50
Hear, fucking hear!
mrshl - 2007-04-21 13:39
Indeed
mike - 2007-04-21 15:37
That behavior is a function of wordpress. Any posts with a more link will be truncated up to that link when the feed is generated. The only option is not using ‘more’ and having posts display full length on the blog.
yancey (ystrickler@emusic.com) - 2007-04-21 16:12
yeah, mike is right. i’ll see if i can find a work-around, but the fact remains that the vast majority of our traffic is non-rss, and for those folks i think the more buttons are a better experience. we’ll try to sort something out, though.
Frank Hecker - 2007-04-22 12:50
Mike and Yancey: Thanks for the update. The problem I have is that if I fall behind on posts and go to the web site to catch up, there’s no easy way to read all the posts in the archives. (There’s the list of recent posts in the right hand navigation bar, but that only goes so far.) Note that one possible workaround to make things easier would be to include links at the top of each post to the previous and next posts in time. (This is what Bob Lefsetz does on his posts.) Then you could start at the most recent post and go back in time reading every post in sequence with a single click.
Ric - 2007-04-23 12:10
What’s the issue with full posts on the blog? I’m with Frank and James in disliking have to continually hit more buttons to see it all … Frank’s last suggestion is the very least 17dots could do, because it’s especially annoying not to be able to go from one full post to the next …
Ric - 2007-04-23 12:11
Oooops - meant to add that this is the one and only reason I don’t subscribe to 17dots, and I’d like to, because I love eMusic.
James Governor’s Monkchips » links for 2007-04-23 - 2007-04-23 23:36
[…] Swindleeeee!!!!! › 17 dots plus 3 dots is too many dots A drumbeat for full text feeds by seventeen dots, the eMusic review blog, begins. All I can see is Hear Hear! (tags: music MP3 eMusic blogs 17dots) […]