A plea to bloggers: put full article in feed

To bloggers everywhere:

I have a sincere request.  As you may know it is possible to put differing amounts of information in blog feeds (such as RSS or Atom).  Most blogs (including this one) put full articles in their blog feed, but some blogs just put short excerpts or teasers in their blog feeds.  I would like to ask the owners of those blogs to please consider putting their blog’s entire articles in RSS.

Here is the reason why I care:  I use different tools to read blogs, but one of the most common tools I use is a smart-phone based RSS aggregator.  (FYI:  the tool I use is “reeder.”)  That tool pre-caches the entire RSS feed of my blog subscriptions, so that I can catch up my blog reading even when I am commuting, on an airplane, or otherwise disconnected from the Internet.  In those cases, I can read articles at my leisure, and resynchronize when my smartphone once again gets into access range.

When a blog just includes a teaser in its RSS feed and not the full story, I am forced to click through to read the entire story.  Even when I have Internet connectivity, this can be slow, and of course it is impossible when I do not have Internet connectivity.  Many blog reading clients have this issue.

I read blogs on desktops or notebook computers less often, but when I do read them, I often use Google Reader (many modern RSS aggregators such as “reeder” sync up with Google Reader).   Here, I usually have connectivity, but because of the way that Google Reader works, there is often a significant delay when I have to click through to an article.

I can understand some reasons why blog owners are motivated to require readers to click though to read articles:  perhaps the most common reason is that blog owners want to get an accurate count on readers.  (If a blog reader stays up to date with RSS feeds alone, it is much harder for blog owners to keep an accurate count of their readers.)   However, when this happens, it makes portions of the blogosphere inaccessible (when the clients are out of range) or inconvenient.

So please, accept this pleading to put blog content in RSS and Atom feeds.  Thanks!