Attracting blog traffic

[vexillia]

I use feedly to keep track of a lot of blogs, but rarely like/visit them directly. I suspect that affects stats as well.

I use feedly to do this too.  It's very useful. 

I know of some blogs that only show truncated articles in their RSS feed to ensure you have to visit the blog.  Some blogger do it to prevent unscrupulous people scraping the article and republishing it as their work.  There's a 10mm blog that does this just to harvest the Adsense revenue: very naughty.

RSS readership will show in the stats if you have stats running on your RSS feed.  I use Feedburner: see https://blog.vexillia.me.uk/2018/06/rss-readership.html

[tabletopwargamer]

I've just started blogging again and I'm loving it!

I've also put a little blog directory on it, so if you'd like to add yours, then feel free, the link is in my signature below 

[pixelgeek]

I know of some blogs that only show truncated articles in their RSS feed to ensure you have to visit the blog.

Or to keep the size of the feed down. If you put the entire article in the feed then you also get full-size images in the feed which makes the RSS pretty much useless for anything else.

[vexillia]

Or to keep the size of the feed down. If you put the entire article in the feed then you also get full-size images in the feed which makes the RSS pretty much useless for anything else.

Not so.  You are confusing the feed with the full page content.  The feed will only contain links to the images and not the images themselves.

The size of the feed is independent of the size of the images therein.  If you've added "full-size" images then both the feed and the original web page will load slowly. 

It's always better to insert a smaller image linked to a larger one.  For Blogger users, Google does this automatically using just one image and if you look closely at the image link it's very easy to resize the image.  Compare:

https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-LUw02boIX18/XdPYy3XQbmI/AAAAAAAAJOQ/_-o9NH3_disXwkGzSO06zJd53gMPBZYUwCLcBGAsYHQ/s600/20191119%2B-%2BS8001190f.jpg

https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-LUw02boIX18/XdPYy3XQbmI/AAAAAAAAJOQ/_-o9NH3_disXwkGzSO06zJd53gMPBZYUwCLcBGAsYHQ/s200/20191119%2B-%2BS8001190f.jpg

The key difference is between "s600" and "s200".  Hope this helps?

[vexillia]

I've also put a little blog directory on it, so if you'd like to add yours, then feel free, the link is in my signature below 

Tried this but got a "The reCAPTCHA validation score failed." error on both Firefox & Vivaldi.  There was no CAPTCHA pop shown even after switching off all the security options.

Update: submission made but no CAPTCHA involved at all.  Curious.

[pixelgeek]

Not so.  You are confusing the feed with the full page content. 

No, I'm not. I was just being more succinct than I needed to be.

The feed will only contain links to the images and not the images themselves.

Yes, but those links are to the image as they appear in the post. So my 700 pixel wide image appears in the text as HTML that leads to that image. If the feed is used in, say a sidebar of a person's blog, then that full image appears taking over the sidebar and screwing up the display. It is also a PITA if you are developing a list of blogs and displaying the content since you never know when someone else is putting full article content in the feed. Even manually building an excerpt or summary is a PITA since you never know when an image is going to show up and what size it is.

You can see this sort of behaviour at sites like

http://figoblogotheque.blogspot.com/

I've included an example.

It's always better to insert a smaller image linked to a larger one.

This behaviour presumes usage though.

My initial objection is actually to a comment in your original post.

I know of some blogs that only show truncated articles in their RSS feed to ensure you have to visit the blog.

So there are several problems here. Your comment presumes a particular way to use an RSS feed. You want to read posts in it. Your presumption leads you to build your posts in a particular way. That presumption leads to problems for people that don't share your reading habits.

RSS was never intended as a way to read a blog. The problem is that there is, AFAIK, no leadership updating or maintaining the standard and so there have been industry lead updates to the format that aren't universally agreed upon. Blogger is a total basket case when it comes to RSS. Google hasn't done anything to that site to make it easier to syndicate content elsewhere as they wanted people to use their Google signup and, while it was running, Google Reader, to explore blogs.

Some sites like Wordpress have features that let you finetune your RSS feed but since the format is effectively stuck in a world before the pre-eminence of Blogger and Wordpress it has issues that haven't been resolved.

[vexillia]

No, I'm not. I was just being more succinct than I needed to be.

 

OTOH Feedly does a really good job of handling all types of feeds: never seen an oversized image.  It's obliviously coded to allow for the numpties.

[pixelgeek]

OTOH Feedly does a really good job of handling all types of feeds: never seen an oversized image.  It's obliviously coded to allow for the numpties.

I use Feedly and it does a good job of post-processing the feeds.

Blogs, and by extension RSS, haven't really seen a lot of love since Google killed off Reader. Facebook also took the opportunity presented by Cambridge Analytica to kill off the ability to post from your blog to your Facebook feed from Wordpress. Not sure if they did the same thing for Blogger.

Blogs are a part of a more open internet that is getting strangled by Facebook.