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.