Growing trend?
Posted: August 27th, 2010 | Author: Don | Filed under: Misc, Wonder | Tags: blog, blogging, bloglines, bloglines.com, blogs, columns, excerpts, format, new trend, read more, three columns, trend | 5 Comments »I’ve been blogging for several years now, and recently I’ve seen a trend that I’m not sure I like. In fact, I KNOW I don’t like it.
People are writing their blogs with short excerpts on the front page, with a “read more”, “click here to continue” link at the end of the excerpt, which then takes you to the whole message they have written. When I see these blogs, unless the excerpt is EXCEPTIONALLY good and leading, I tend to ignore the whole blog and move on.
Why do this? Is it to get more entries on one page? That is the only reason I can see to do it. It is not to keep them on your blog, as they are already there…
Now, I can see submitting only excerpts to sites such as bloglines.com and such so you get the reader to come to your site, and hopefully stay a while, but in general, the front page of your blog, to me, should have the whole message there and not require me to click to read it all.
Another trend is in format, again one I’m not liking, and how the blog looks. Many people are choosing a three column format in which two of the columns have squares of excerpts with the “read more” and the third column is full of ads and junk. Looks VERY cluttered to me, and is often difficult to read, so I move on and don’t read them….
Another one of those I don’t get it days I guess…
I agree with you for the most part. I don’t like to see the more… function as a standard formatting tool on the front page. I have a blog that is shared with another person and they insisted on using that method of keeping the listings of previous posts compact and easy to browse. The end result is that people very seldom read whole posts.
On my own blog, I only use the more… option when I post an exceptionally long post. And then, I will put the continuation at a logical break in the article where the person who chooses to continue will get more details, but the person who doesn’t has already gotten the meat of the post.
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Hey Don! So I read a few of your posts. I love these ramblings of yours.
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It’s not as if they have to save paper! I tend not to ‘read more’. I wonder if it’s an age thing; younger bloggers need to make changes in order to make blogging their own.
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When I first started my blog I wanted to do the read more feature so that I could post multiple images but keep them off the main page so it wouldn’t slow down load time. I had it set up like that for a little while, but never actually had all the pictures in my blog that I had originally thought of. I sometimes wonder if this is the reason people have the read more option. I completely agree, that first section better be pretty interesting if I’m going to be clicking to read more.
I also agree with the 3 column thing. I had two side bars, one on the right and one on the left. The right one had all my blog updates, twitter, visitors, and a few links to blogging sites. The left one had… well it didn’t really ever have anything over there because I didn’t really need the other column. So I got rid of it. When I did put some things over there just to see it, it was, like you said, very cluttered.
I definitely agree with you on these things, especially since I’ve tried them myself and did not like the way they looked.
Tarheelrambler – that is the only way I could see the read more option come in handy. Give the audience what it needs in the main section, and put the details in the read more.
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I agree, I don’t like to click on the read more.
I had a hard time trying to figure out where your comment section was on you blog.
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