Continue Reading
In the spirit of Blaugust, allow me to give an unsolicited opinion: excerpts suck. If I see a post in my Feedly roll that is just a paragraph that ends with Continue Reading… I don’t. That blog gets dropped.
There’s really only two reasons to have excerpts on: you don’t know better, or you do. In the latter case, congrats on being a cog in the giant SEO/clickbait bullshit machine. Be better, if you can.
In case you’re a member of the former category though, for WordPress check Settings > Reading:
Are there legitimate concerns about having your blog content displayed in an RSS aggregator versus readers coming directly to your blog? Maybe. I have no idea if someone reading this post on Feedly will have their View register on my WordPress stats or whatever. I could also see concerns about post formatting if you care about that sort of thing. For example, I spend an inordinate amount of time trying to avoid orphan words in the blog proper. Seriously, check my posts sometimes (engagement!). None of which matters for Feedly readers though, because those line lengths are all over the place.
You might think me arrogant for suggesting that losing my subscription to your blog is a reason to turn off excerpts. I would instead suggest that forcing readers to open a new tab just for you is itself the height of arrogance. Do you yourself open tabs for every blog you follow every day, like it’s 2005? No.
Turn off your excerpts. Thanks for reading.
Posted on August 11, 2025, in Commentary and tagged Arrogance, Blaugust, Continue Reading, Excerpts, Feedly, Unsolicited Advice. Bookmark the permalink. 4 Comments.
In An Age 
” Do you yourself open tabs for every blog you follow every day, like it’s 2005? No.”
Erm… yes. I think so, anyway, assuming I’m understanding what that means. I use Feedly but all I use it for is to keep me advised of when any blog I’ve added to the RSS feed publishes a new post.
I have absolutely everything on Feedly switched off that can be switched off and I have the Index page as the default. When I switch my PC on I have it set to open Firefox with four tabs – Gmail, Feedly’s Index Page, my blog and the Met Office weather for where I live. Those four tabs stay open until I shut the machine down again.
During the day I check the Feedly tab every time I have a moment and if anything new has appeared (Which it always has.) I click through each link in the index to the blog or website page and read it there. The only time I read something on Feedly itself is occasionally when a blog or website won’t open for technical reasons but the post is still visible in the feed. Even then I generally go back to the website later to make sure I haven’t missed anything. Well, if I remember…
It has literally never occured to me anyone would prefer the clearly aesthetically inferior experience of reading a blog post directly from the feed. Surely you have to be missing so much?
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The only times I actually click through into a blog is if I want to make a comment, or if I suspect others have made humorous comment. Otherwise, yes, I consume content directly in Feedly. It is an aesthetic experience not dissimilar to Reddit or the message boards of yore, which I use(d) extensively.
It is difficult to “miss” something I do not routinely see, but taking a gander at a few random blogs… nope. More visually appealing, with colors and logos and such? Sure. But also the text is enormous, spaced-out, and I have to scroll for ages for a single post about something I was not actually interested in. Some are better/worse than others, of course. I find yours to be on the better end, as a matter of fact.
The one unfortunate downside I recognize is missing things like alternatively populated blogrolls. When I left Google Blogger, that was the one feature that I (still) missed the most; why WordPress doesn’t have an easy alternate is beyond me. On the other hand, as you sort of allude to, a standard blogroll these days is meaningless once you get more than 30+ blogs in there as stuff gets buried. You need things like Feedly to keep things organized and to remember which sites you have already checked.
From there… just expand the post. Consume. Repeat.
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+1 for (mostly) reading on the native blog site.
Still kinda mind blown about the line-length-anti-orphan thing though actually. I had never consciously noticed it.
Anywho, despite mostly going to the blog direct, I am still 100% with you on excerpts being a frustration. Particularly when things get busy (i.e., Blaugust) I do tend to head back to Reader to scroll through and then click into ones of interest.
An excerpt never contains enough to let me make that judgement, so I just don’t go through.
I think the other concern people have historically had though (and it was valid, I’ve seen it happen, and not just to the most popular blogs of the day) where people have scraped RSS feeds and reposted content wholesale.
So… OK, I get it. But why risk frustrating all your legitimate readers to simply have such content vampires switch up to a scraper anyway?
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@Naithin
Sorry for introducing the memetic hazard that is orphan words. Someone told me about them ages ago and now I perceive them everywhere. Including, sometimes, the conspicuous absence of them.
The humorous thing about excerpts from most blogs is exactly what you imply: they are implemented poorly. If someone has “legitimate” reasons to use excerpts due to fears of theft or need for ad revenue, fine. But, presumably, they would actually be cognizant of how the excerpt looks in RSS feeds and tailor the opening paragraph in such a way to hook the reader. Everywhere I look, excerpts are just the first 120 characters or whatever, which means the author doesn’t care.
So… turn them off, guys.
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