Full or shortened posts? Your experience please

[petercasier]

One of the blogger dilemma's I am currently chewing on, is whether to publish my blog posts in full, or to publish a 'teaser' or 'shortened post' with a link to the full post.

The advantage of shortened posts is that you can have more posts on your blog 'home page', and people can choose easier over a wide range of posts. (in my experience, very few people go to 'older posts' or browse through the 'archive'.)

The disadvantage is that either the shortened posts should be expandable through a script (which in e.g. blogger is a bit of work), or should link to another (hidden) post with the full contents. The latter means two posts will be indexed by Google. Also the 'teaser' should ideally be more than just the first two paragraphs of the full post... it should 'tease' the reader to go to the full post.

What is your experience: do you use shortened posts? What is your readers' appreciation of this, what do they prefer? Do you have the impression you loose traffic by "collapsing" posts? How do you feel about this, as a reader?

Peter.

[sadiessay-so]

I use full posts, and I show 5 on my front page so my blog doesn't take 8 years to load. There's nothing worse than going to someone's blog and there are a billion posts on the front page and it takes forever to load and then the scroll bar is so tiny you can barely grab it... Pet peeve, sorry. Anyway, just my opinion, but I don't like when people have teaser posts. I'd rather read the whole thing on the main page. I'm one to click around for older posts, though, so I stay on blogs long enough to find all the good information there is to find.

[raider23]

I would be interested to hear more opinions. I presently use full page,maybe someone can make a case for or against it

[raider23]

After reading thia, I did a search on Googel and found this

Do You Publish Full Text Feeds Or Partial RSS Feeds ? - Digital Inspiration

Take a look in their opinion it is no contest

[DrK]

I switched to partial posts. It looks cleaner in my opinion. It's rather annoying to deal with on blogger though. I would say if you aren't writing many articles then full is fine but if you right a lot then I would do partial.

I think mine is set to 5 posts and they're partial.

[Bloggeries]

Partial is good on the front page but make it long enough so that someone can atleast get an idea of what it is about before clicking. Some summaries are SOOO SHORT that I can't even get into the post so I never bother venturing further. That could be just me though.

[DrK]

Originally Posted by Bloggeries

Partial is good on the front page but make it long enough so that someone can atleast get an idea of what it is about before clicking. Some summaries are SOOO SHORT that I can't even get into the post so I never bother venturing further. That could be just me though.

That's a good point. I'm gonna have to go back and review mine to see if they are too short.

Thanks for the tip.

[EverythingEverywhere]

I'd say full posts.

However, if you have a magazine format blog, then you really can't do that.

If the purpose of not doing full posts is to increase page views, then don't do it. Maximize the user experience to maximize your readership. When you become an A-list blogger you can then worry about maximizing revenue via page layout.

[bookblog]

Partial.

Let the reader decide which ones they are interested in reading more about. I currently have a small thumbnail along with a short excerpt to display what the post is about. I also run 2 featured articles at the top at all times, to mix it up.

[ianpeatey]

I also think it depends on how frequently you post. As a reader I prefer full length posts on those posting less frequently (2 to 3 times a week) and summaries on those posting daily or more frequently.

And .. it also depends on the subject of the blog. For informational blogs I prefer summaries and for more thought provoking, personal or journal blogs I like full posts.

For RSS feeds .. full posts always.

All comes down to personal preference.

Ian