Never mind the scrapers!
Those who subscribe to Gear Diary’s RSS know that for the longest time we have used an abbreviated or truncated feed. If you read a bit and liked what you saw, then you could click the link and come see the rest of the article on the main site. The biggest reason we did this was because in the site’s early days we started off with a full feed — which was promptly scraped and reposted on various other sites around the net. That led to truncating the feed and at least having the knowledge that when our feeds were scraped the resulting post would automatically have a link back to Gear Diary in the form of the “read more” link that went to the rest of the article.
Scraping is still a problem, and its severity seems to come and go; nothing new there. So what’s changed?
Last week all of the Gawker Media sites that I enjoy, including Gizmodo, Jezebel and Lifehacker truncated their feeds without any fanfare. I was so spoiled by reading their full feeds that at first I didn’t notice what was different, and then I was like … “ooooh man!” 🙁
Then I found a workaround (that works for now anyway) — you can get their full feeds by entering the name of the site plus “vip.xml” (without the quotation marks) — which is what I immediately did. And then I realized that I was being completely hypocritical. Why should I enjoy full feeds on those sites when I wasn’t even offering them to you? That was a major FAIL on my part.
Well, enough of that … effective immediately, you now have a choice: you can subscribe to Gear Diary FULL FEEDS or our old-fashioned Abbreviated or Truncated Feeds by clicking the RSS logos on the upper right column (the left RSS symbol is the full feed, the one on the right is the truncated version), or you can click the feed buttons under posts on their individual pages. There’s also an option to subscribe to the comments, for those who hate to miss a good debate.
And as always – thank you for being part of our readership; we are happy to have you here. 🙂
I can’t tell you how awesome it is to have full feeds. I completely understand why sites do that so I don’t complain out loud but when browsing my feeds and having to click “read more” and open up another tab can get annoying fast (especially when you read on the iphone and a specific site so often). It’s great that you guys switched to a full feed. Keep up the good work.
I’m so glad you’ve done this Judie! What with all the flack going on about ad blocking and full versus abbreviated feeds over at Ars, it’s refreshing to see your site take the approach you have and not hide your “full” content behind a pay wall. I read you mostly from my Viigo app on my BlackBerry so forcing me over to the web browser to get the full article was a pain. I also pull you into Outlook using RSSPopper and it’s from there that I come here to read and make comments on subjects that interest me.
Once again thanks and congrats!
Thank you very much, Judie! For the longest time I felt a little sad every time I click on “Read more”, but now I’m very happy!
AWESOME, JUDY. Thanks so much for the tip and thanks for bringing back full feeds. I’m so excited. I love reading Gear Diary on my iPhone. Thanks.
This is awesome. Thanks so much Judie!
Ha! Y’all are awesome. Thanks for helping me *know* that I made the right decision. 🙂
It seems the full feeds are ‘gone again.’ 🙁 I’m not getting full feeds in my Google Reader from GearDiary anymore. 🙁
What happened?
Okay, so what happened is that I had to get rid of a Feed re-director that we were using so that author feeds would be available.
While I was in there, I had the option of making the main Gear Diary feed a full feed, and I decided that made the most sense. Here’s the deal – there are about 7K subscribed to the main Gear Diary feed, and there were about 300 subscribed to the full feed. So I basically swapped them so that the larger number would get the greatest benefit.
So now the feed ending with /GearDiary is the full feed, and the one ending with /geardiary/hQVw is the truncated feed. I am sorry for the inconvenience, but I do not see you ever having to change the settings again if you do it this time. :-))
OK..cool…updated my reader to the new link and all is good again. Thanks for supporting my feed reading tech needs.